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Updated: June 3, 2025
Debate in the House of Commons on the Modernist proposals for Church Reform would begin after Easter. Already every member of the House was being bombarded from both sides by his constituents. Such a heat of religious feeling, such a passion of religious hope and fear, had not been seen in England for generations.
When I use the word "modernism," I am not alluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name. It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.
But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of Robert Elsmere, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature.
The Close was crowded to see them come. Lines of theological students were drawn up there, fresh-faced boys in round collars and long black coats, who, as the main body of the Modernist clergy approached, began defiantly to chant the Creed. Meynell, with the old yet stately Bishop leaning on his arm, passed them with a friendly, quiet look.
Such at least was the Bishop's confidence, and in the position in which he found himself with seven Modernist evictions pending in his diocese, and many more than seven recalcitrant parishes to deal with, he was not the man to make needless friction.
Her sacramental and sacerdotal system is based on supernatural mechanism on divine interventions in the physical world conditioned by human agency; her theology and books of devotion are full of supernatural mechanism; the lives of her saints, her relics and holy places, the whole literature of Catholic mysticism, the living piety and devotion of the faithful, wherever it is still to be found, are based entirely on that very theory of supernaturalistic dualism which the Modernist, when he acts as critic, begins by ruling out as devoid of any historical or scientific actuality.
But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely. Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new theology or the modernist church. We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them. The very doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies of the earth.
In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I have just read in a newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other good things, must not come from outside." To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication.
There is, as Modernist critics have seen, a real break between the Palestinian Gospel and the elaborate mystery-religion, with its graded hierarchy, its Roman organisation, its Hellenistic speculative theology, which achieved the conquest of the Empire in the fourth century. The Church, as Loisy says, determined to survive and to conquer, and adapted itself to the demands of the time.
A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts.
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