ic piety has sheltered itself for fifteen
hundred years has fallen in ruins to the ground. There is still enough
superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at
Lourdes, and split hailstones at Remiremont. But that kind of religion
is doomed, and will not survive three generations of sound secular
education given equally to both sexes. The craving for signs and
wonders--that broad road which attracts so many converts and wins so
rapid a success--leads religion at last to its destruction, as Christ
seems to have warned His own disciples. Science has been the slowly
advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised
Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she
will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor. She has left us
the divine Christ, whatever may be the truth about certain mysterious
events in His human life. But assuredly she has not left us the right to
offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left
us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on
hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and knowledge will not serve.
Man is one, and reality is one; there can no more be two 'orders of
reality' not affecting each other than there can be two faculties in the
human mind working independently of each other. The universe which is
interpreted to us by our understanding is not unreal, nor are its laws
pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely
ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and
Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is
not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to
contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M.
Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'--myths in fact--which do not
become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems to
suggest. Faith is not the born storyteller of Modernist theology. Faith
is, on the practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by the
noblest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is a progressive
initiation, by experiment which ends in experience, into the unity of
the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner assurance
that these three attributes of the divine nature have one source and
conduct to one goal.

The Modernists