United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With every month of the struggle indeed, as the Modernist attack had grown more determined, and its support more widespread, so the orthodox defence had gathered force and vehemence. Yet through the length and breadth of the country the Modernist petition to Parliament was now kindling such a fire as no resistance could put out.
Wives recover the loss of their husbands with amazing rapidity, husbands "get over" the demise of their wives with the galloping ease of trained hunters leaping an accustomed fence families forget their dead as resolutely as some debtors forget their bills, and to express sorrow, pity, tenderness, affection, or any sort of "sentiment" whatever is to expose one's self to derision and contempt from the "normal" modernist who cultivates cynicism as a fine art.
The modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he forgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its message was believed.
His correspondent wrote to suggest that after all the sermon would be more fitly entrusted to the Modernist Bishop of Dunchester himself. "He has worked hard, and risked much for us. I may say that inquiries have been thrown out, and we find he is willing." No apology perfunctory regrets and very little explanation! Meynell understood. He put the letter away, conscious of a keenly smarting mind.
The old red sandstone church of Upcote Minor was closely packed on Sunday; and the loyalty of the parish to their Rector, their answer to the Arches judgment, was shown in the passion, the loving intelligence with which every portion of the beautiful Modernist service was followed by an audience of working men and women gathered both from Upcote itself and from the villages round, who knew very well and gloried in the fact that from their midst had started the flame now running through the country.
But the Modernist critics start with very well-defined presuppositions. They ridicule the notion that 'God is a personage in history'; they assume that for the historian 'He cannot be found anywhere'; that He is as though He did not exist.
Christianity is a tremendous thing; let no man, believer or unbeliever, attempt to make light of it. It is not compassion for the intellectual difficulties of the average man which has made Dr. Inge a conservative modernist, if so I may call him. Sentiment of no kind whatever has entered into the matter.
What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes him a strangely long time to discover it.
Those forms of modernist music that dispense with scales altogether, in which therefore there are no fixed points de repere like the tonic or dominant of the older music, can express chance momentary moods by means of rich and strange colors, but not an orderly and purposeful experience.
Let him take it for granted in the fashion of the strictly æsthetic commentator who writes in sympathy with a Fra Angelico painting, or as that great modernist, Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches the problems of faith in the life of St. Francis.
Word Of The Day