ly Christian texts.
But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and
governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from
the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they
were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of
any sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a
sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost
everything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for
nationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in
nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are
scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were
willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its
vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent
before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism
which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of
national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is
fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less
power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan
society in which they are forced to live.

The question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one,
because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it
happens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less
distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity
coincide--what a miracle!--with his own Lutheran and Kantian
sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is
the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well
expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by
what it seems in its primitive mi