Everything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as
the modernists bitterly complain, very little is heard of the views
held in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the
Christian religion is only one of many, some of them older and
superior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and
contains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided
into rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and
its future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to
persuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere
is founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical
evidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect
and spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from
the outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive
and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.

This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him
a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
the world is made