Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
It has been my trouble all my life that I can see every side of a question. I am with the modernists, but at the same time I can understand how dangerous it must seem to the dogmatists to abandon even an inch of the country that Paul conquered for them. I'm afraid, Wistons, that I see life in terms of men and women rather than of creeds. I want men to be happy and at peace with one another.
While social revolutionaries were endeavouring to make the most out of Bergson, many leaders of religious thought, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo- Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them endeavoured to find encouragement and stimulus in his work.
When the time comes for this building to rise, the contributions of the Modernists will not be described as wood, hay, or stubble. They have done valuable service to biblical criticism, and in other branches, which will be always recognised. History shows few examples of the rejuvenescence of decayed autocracies. Nor is our generation likely to see much of the reconstruction.
The modernists talk a great deal of development, and they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism, Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give out the full and exact note of the New Testament.
A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the motives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of so many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under rather unfortunate circumstances.
It is an amiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the Renaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive just because it presupposes that Christianity is true. Yet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I suspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion.
Camouflaged under an attractive name, modernists doubt or deny the real inspiration of the Bible, the Virgin birth of Jesus, his deity, his miracles, his bodily resurrection, the resurrection of the dead, and his personal second coming to judge the quick and the dead. Some modernists reject a part of these great truths, and some reject all.
But there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the next development will be in the direction of that peculiar kind of Liberalism favoured by the Modernists.
With reference to the imitation of nature, at the mere mention of which modernists become so furious, it is worth recalling that the earliest story about painting relates to Zeuxis, who is said to have painted a bunch of grapes with such skill that the birds ignored the fruit and pecked at the picture.
No civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an evolution as Athens in the fifth century B.C.; but when that century was over, it was still possible for a philosopher to draw robust symbolical illustrations from the old mythology. The Modernists to-day are only applying a law of history when they say that religion must evolve with the evolution of human culture.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking