it appears, can still say 'Ora pro nobis' to a Mary whose biography he
believes to be purely mythical. At any rate, he can tell his consultants
with a good conscience that if they pray to Mary for grace they will
receive it. But what is the good of this make-believe? And, if it is
part of a transaction in which the worshipper pays money for assistance
which he believes to be miraculous and only obtainable through the good
offices of the Church, is it even morally honest? The worshipper may be
helped by his subjective conviction that his cheque on the treasury of
merit has been honoured; but if, apart from the natural effects of
suggestion, nothing has been given him but a mere _placebo_, is the
sacerdotal office one which an honourable man would wish to fill?

We have no wish whatever to make any imputation against the motives of
the brave men who have withstood the thunders of the Vatican, and who in
some cases have been professionally ruined by their courageous avowal of
their opinions. Perhaps none but a Catholic priest can understand how
great the sacrifice is when one in his position breaks away from the
authority of those who speak in the name of the Church, and deliberately
incurs the charge, still so terrible in Catholic ears, of being a
heretic and a teacher of heresy. Not one man in twenty would dare to
face the storm of obloquy, hatred, and calumny which is always ready to
fall on the head of a heretical priest. The Encyclical indicates the
measures which are to be taken officially against Modernists. Pius X
ordains that all the young professors suspected of Modernism are to be
driven from their chairs in the seminaries; that infected books are to
be condemned indiscriminately, even though they may have received an
_imprimatur_; that a committee of censors is to be established in every
diocese for the revision of books; that meetings of liberal priests or
laymen are to be forbidden; that every diocese is to have a vigilance
committee to discover and inform against Modernists; and that young
clerical Modernists are to be put 'in the lowest places,' and held up to
the contempt of their more orthodox or obsequious comrades. But this
persecution is as nothing compared with the crushing condemnation with
which the religious world, which is his only world, visits this kind of
contumacy; the loss of friendships, the grief and shame of loved
relatives, and the haunting dread that an authority so august as that
which