God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon
became heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own
weapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister
convictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without
Luther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent
Caesar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel
fashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the
literal realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too
much the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While
the church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these
principles can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who
feel themselves to be exiles in this world--and what noble mind, from
Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?--are mightily inclined to
believe themselves citizens of another. There will always be
spontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of
sin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the
supernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers
will not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed
if it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the
philosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment
when any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,
when new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,
when the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap
philosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when
the judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday
and smile at those of to-day--such a moment is rather ill chosen for
prophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because
your own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you
hold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary
postulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.

Modernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic
and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the
rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other
modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.
The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is
creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as
Catholics; for what makes them adop