w of the Modernists are more
than amateurs in philosophy. They are quick to see the strategic
possibilities of a theory which separates faith and knowledge, and
declares that truths of faith can never come into collision with truths
of fact, because they 'belong to different orders.' It suits them to
follow the pragmatists in talking about 'freely chosen beliefs,' and
'voluntary certainty '; Mr. Tyrrell even maintains that 'the great mass
of our beliefs are reversible, and depend for their stability on the
action or permission of the will.' But philosophy is for them mainly a
controversial weapon. It gives them the means of justifying their
position as Catholics who wish to remain loyal to their Church and her
formularies, but no longer believe in the miracles which the Church has
always regarded as matters of fact. Nevertheless, an attempt must be
made to explain a point of view which, to the plain man, is very strange
and unfamiliar.

Two words are constantly in the mouth of Modernist controversialists in
speaking of their opponents. The adherents of the traditional theology
are 'intellectualists,' and their conception of reality is 'static.' The
meaning of the latter charge may perhaps be best explained from
Laberthonniere's brilliantly written essay, 'Le Realisme Chretien et
l'Idealisme Grec.' The Greeks, he says, were insatiable in their desire
to _see_, like children. Blessedness, for them, consisted in a complete
vision of reality; and, since thought is the highest kind of vision,
salvation was conceived of by them as the unbroken contemplation of the
perfectly true, good, and beautiful. Hence arose the philosophy of
'concepts'; they idealised nature by considering it _sub specie
aeternitatis_. Reality resided in the unchanging ideas; the mutable, the
particular, the individual was for them an embarrassment, a 'scandal of
thought.' The sage always tries to escape from the moving world of
becoming into the static world of being. But an ideal world, so
conceived, can only be an abstraction, an impoverishment of reality.
Such an idealism gives us neither a science of origins nor a science of
ends. Greek wisdom sought eternity and forgot time; it sought that which
never dies, and found that which never lives.

'An abstract doctrine, like that of Greek philosophy or of
Spinoza, consists always in substituting for reality, by
simplification, ideas or concepts which they think
statically in their l