vous system. Some are sanguine enough to think that, by scientific
examination of psychical phenomena, we may possibly come to know whether
the "spirits" of dead people exist. If the existence of such a world of
spirits were ever established, it would possibly be the greatest blow
ever sustained by Christianity. For the great appeal of this and of some
other religions

[198] lies in the promise of a future life of which otherwise we should
have no knowledge. If existence after death were proved and became a
scientific fact like the law of gravitation, a revealed religion might
lose its power. For the whole point of a revealed religion is that it is
not based on scientific facts. So far as I know, those who are
convinced, by spiritualistic experiments, that they have actual converse
with spirits of the dead, and for whom this converse, however delusive
the evidence may be, is a fact proved by experience, cease to feel any
interest in religion. They possess knowledge and can dispense with
faith.

The havoc which science and historical criticism have wrought among
orthodox beliefs during the last hundred years was not tamely submitted
to, and controversy was not the only weapon employed. Strauss was
deprived of his professorship at Tuebingen, and his career was ruined.
Renan, whose sensational Life of Jesus also rejected the supernatural,
lost his chair in the College de France. Buechner was driven from
Tuebingen (1855) for his book on Force and Matter, which, appealing to
the general public, set forth the futility of supernatural explanations
of the universe. An attempt was made to chase Haeckel from Jena. In
recent years,

[199] a French Catholic, the Abbe Loisy, has made notable contributions
to the study of the New Testament and he was rewarded by major
excommunication in 1907.

Loisy is the most prominent figure in a growing movement within the
Catholic Church known as Modernism--a movement which some think is the
gravest crisis in the history of the Church since the thirteenth
century. The Modernists do not form an organized party; they have no
programme. They are devoted to the Church, to its traditions and
associations, but they look on Christianity as a religion which has
developed, and whose vitality depends upon its continuing to develop.
They are bent on reinterpreting the dogmas in the light of modern
science and criticism. The idea of development had already been applied
by Cardinal Newman to Catholic th