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Updated: June 12, 2025
The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance, convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may lead them.
Modernists give such a diluted interpretation to inspiration, to the statements of Scripture, and the Apostles' Creed, and the creeds of the churches, that all may mean little or nothing, and the floodgates of infidelity and atheism are opened wide.
The Cardinal is right; it is quite unnecessary to insist upon it; but, when the Modernists claim Newman as their prophet, it is fair to reply that, if we may judge from his writings, he would gladly have sent some of them to the stake. The Modernist movement, properly so called, belongs to the last twenty years, and most of the literature dates from the present century.
The Modernists are right in finding the primary principle of faith in the depths of our undivided personality. They are right in teaching that faith develops and comes into its own only through the activity of the whole man. They are right in denying the name of faith to correct opinion, which may leave the character untouched.
To tell the truth, these modernists did not permit the hereafter to awe or affright them. Some of them went to church, but they did so calmly, patiently, as to a decorous function, and some may at times have prayed, through the medium of printed supplication, but, generally speaking, they had reached a sort of philosophic indifference as to the one-time burning question of heaven or hell.
We seem to hear, not the Tuscan painter bred to regard the style of Michelangelo as an article of faith, to imitate his sculptural smoothness of finish and that of Angelo Bronzino, but some intelligent exponent of impressionistic methods, defending both from attack and from superficial imitation one of the most advanced of modernists.
It is quite true, as the modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas. Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity.
The Modernists themselves desire, for the most part, that criticism rather than philosophy should be regarded as the starting-point of the movement.
I could fancy him in his new town house, struggling through some endless dinner party his cynical, stone-gray eyes sweeping up and down the table, his lips curled in that habitual sneer, his mind, perhaps, gone back to the red-and-blue room in Chelsea, where he had been wont to stand astride before the black mantel, bellowing indecencies into the ears of witty modernists.
Every variety of infidel and species of atheist will rejoice, if evolution be accepted,-whether modernists, liberals, rationalists, or simple unbelievers on their way to the bottomless pit. If evolution wins, Christianity loses and the church fails.
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