guage or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the
contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly
supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.
Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the
love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.
It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has
discovered that he is a pagan.

When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double
allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological
criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while
the Christian dogmas touching these things--the incarnation and
resurrection of Christ, for instance--must be taken in a purely
symbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it
seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of
meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth
there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of
little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of
all religions, is to be found in its _moral idealism_, I mean, in the
expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,
of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a
moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what
it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic
rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity
is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the
pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of
salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,
from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the
Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons
and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have
lost all force for it and become fables.

The modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion
that Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox
though amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,
any hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore
compatible with Catholicism. He bathes himself in idealistic
philosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates
rationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon