gestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of
religion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the
conventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are
superficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may
have disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers
themselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,
and say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be
saved--for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.
These philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient
method of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a
falsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We
may well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not
in consciousness but in nature, which intelligence alone can reveal;
but we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial
growth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of
the world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,
and of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore
probably more lasting human possession than is that of clear
historical or scientific ideas.

Now religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than
the Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than
the Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically
for the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its
probable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in
internal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a
strong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave
the church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,
ridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but
must use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is
not those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments
only as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them
literally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the
rich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries,