really in such an advanced stage of decay that it
must die before it can live, why do those who grasp the situation wish
to keep it alive? Are they not precisely pouring their new wine into old
bottles? Mr. Tyrrell himself draws the parallel with Judaism in the
first century. Paul, he says, 'did not feel that he had broken with
Judaism,' But the Synagogue did feel that he had done so, and history
proved that the Synagogue was right.

Development, however great the changes which it exhibits, can only
follow certain laws; and the development of the Church of Rome has
steadily followed a direction opposite to that which the Modernists
demand that it shall take. Newman might plausibly claim that the
doctrines of purgatory and of the papal supremacy are logically involved
in the early claims of the Roman Church. The claim is true at least in
this sense, that, given a political Church organised as an autocracy,
these useful doctrines were sure, in the interests of the government, to
be promulgated sooner or later. 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. It is difficult
to see how the Vatican could even meet the reformers half-way without
making ruinous concessions.' This supernatural mechanism,' M. Loisy says
in his last book, 'Modernism tends to ruin completely,' Just so; but the
Roman Church lives entirely on the faith in supernatural mechanism. Her
sacramental and sacerdotal system is based on supernatural mechanism--on
divine interventions in the physical world conditioned by human agency;
her theology and books of devotion are full of supernatural mechanism;
the lives of her saints, her relics and holy places, the whole
literature of Catholic mysticism, the living piety and devotion of the
faithful, wherever it is still to be found, are based entirely on that
very theory of supernaturalistic dualism which the Modernist, when he
acts as critic, begins by ruling out as devoid of any historical or
scientific actuality. The attractiveness of Catholicism as a cult
depends almost wholly on its frank admission of the miraculous as a
matter of daily occurrence. To rationalise even contemporary history as
M. Loisy has rationalised the Gospels would be suicide for Catholicism.

It is tempting to give a concrete instance by way of illustrating the
impassable chasm which divides Catholicism as a working system