ly an imaginative presumption) is justified by
our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make
instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid
or on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it
would be a sign of apostasy.

Now the modernists' criterion of probability in history or of
worthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of
their contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in
history and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical
criticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no
special remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,
with no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is
remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they
should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this
non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to
the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are
particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of
history, of theology, and of the world.