sh peasant whose pathetic
ignorance of the forces opposed to Him led Him to the absurd enterprise
of attempting a _coup d'etat_ at Jerusalem? Is not Jesus reduced by this
criticism to the same level as Theudas or Judas of Galilee? and, if this
is the true account, what sentiment can we feel, when we read His tragic
story, but compassion tinged with contempt?

And on what principles are such liberties taken with our authorities?
What is the criterion by which it is decided that Christ said, 'I am a
king,' but not 'My kingdom is not of this world'? Why must the
resurrection have been only a subjective hallucination in the minds of
the disciples? To these questions there is a plain answer. The
non-intervention of God in history is an axiom with the Modernists.
'L'historien,' says M. Loisy, 'n'a pas a s'inspirer de l'agnosticisme
pour ecarter Dieu de l'histoire; il ne l'y rencontre jamais.'[75] It
would be more accurate to say that, whenever the meeting takes place,
'the historian' gives the Other the cut direct.

But now comes in the peculiar philosophy by which the Modernists claim
to rehabilitate themselves as loyal and orthodox Catholics, and to turn
the flank of the rationalist position, which they have seemed to occupy
themselves. The reaction against Absolutism in philosophy has long since
established itself in Germany and France. In England and Scotland the
battle still rages; in America the rebound has been so violent that an
extreme form of anti-intellectualism is now the dominant fashion in
philosophy. It would have been easy to predict--and in fact the
prediction was made--that the new world-construction in terms of will
and action, which disparages speculative or theoretical truth and gives
the primacy to what Kant called the practical reason, would be eagerly
welcomed by Christian apologists, hard-pressed by the discoveries of
science and biblical criticism. Protestants, in fact, had recourse to
this method of apologetic before the Modernist movement arose. The
Ritschlian theology in Germany (in spite of its 'static' view of
revelation), and the _Symbolo-fideisme_ of Sabatier and Menegoz, have
many affinities with the position of Tyrrell, Laberthonniere, and Le
Roy.

It is exceedingly difficult to compress into a few pages a fair and
intelligible statement of a _Weltansicht_ which affects the whole
conception of reality, and which has many ramifications. There is an
additional difficulty in the fact that fe