o
analyse these documents, nor is it necessary to do so. It will be more
to the purpose to consider whether, in spite of their official
condemnation, the Modernists are likely in the future to make good their
footing in the Roman Church.

Even before the Encyclical the Modernists had used very bold language
about the authority of the Church.

'The visible Church (writes Mr. Tyrrell in his "Much-abused
Letter") is but a means, a way, a creature, to be used where
it helps, to be left where it hinders.... Who have taught us
that the consensus of theologians cannot err, but the
theologians themselves? Mortal, fallible, ignorant men like
ourselves! ... Their present domination is but a passing
episode in the Church's history.... May not history repeat
itself? [as in the transition from Judaism to Christianity].
Is God's arm shortened that He should not again out of the
very stones raise up seed to Abraham? May not Catholicism,
like Judaism, have to die in order that it may live again in
a greater and grander form? Has not every organism got its
limits of development, after which it must decay and be
content to survive in its progeny? Wine-skins stretch, but
only within measure; for there comes at last a
bursting-point when new ones must be provided.'

In a note he explains: 'The Church of the Catacombs became the Church of
the Vatican; who can tell what the Church of the Vatican may not turn
into?'

It is thus on a very elastic theory of development that the Modernists
rely. 'The differences between the larval and final stages of many an
insect are often far greater than those which separate kind from kind.'
And so this Proteus of a Church, which has changed its form so
completely since the Gospel was first preached in the subterranean
galleries of Rome, may undergo another equally startling metamorphosis
and come to believe in a God who never intervenes in history. We may
here remind our readers of Newman's tests of true development, and mark
the enormous difference.

Mr. Tyrrell's 'Much-abused Letter' reaches, perhaps, the high-water mark
of Modernist claims. Not all the writers whom we have quoted would view
with complacency the prospect of the Catholic Church dying to live
again, or being content to live only in its progeny. The proverb about
the new wine-skins is one of sinister augury in such a connection. If
the Catholic Church is