, a few questions which we are bound to ask him.
First, is his idea of the Church Christian? Did the Founder of
Christianity contemplate or even implicitly sanction the establishment
of a semi-political international society, such as the Catholic Church
has actually been? Orthodox Catholicism maintains that He did. Modernism
admits that He did not, but adds that if He had known that the Messianic
expectation was illusory, and that the existing world-order was to
continue for thousands of years, He would certainly have wished that a
Catholic Church should exist. And, argues the Modernist, if it is a good
thing that a Catholic Church should exist, it is useless to quarrel with
the conditions under which alone it can maintain its existence. The
philosophical historian must admit that all the changes which the
Catholic Church has undergone--its concessions to Pagan superstition,
its secular power, its ruthless extirpation of rebels against its
authority, its steadily growing centralisation and autocracy--were
forced upon it in the struggle for existence. Those who wish that Church
history had been different are wishing the impossible, or wishing that
the Church had perished. But this argument is not valid as a defence of
a divine institution. It is rather a merciless exposure of what happens,
and must happen, to a great idea when it is enslaved by an institution
of its own creation. The political organisation which has grown up round
the idea ends by strangling it, and continues to fight for its own
preservation by the methods which govern the policy of all other
political organisations--force, fraud, and accommodation. There is
nothing in the political history of Catholicism which suggests in the
slightest degree that the spirit of Christ has been the guiding
principle in its councils. Its methods have, on the contrary, been more
cruel, more fraudulent, more unscrupulous, than those of most secular
powers. If the Founder of Christianity had appeared again on earth
during the so-called ages of faith, it is hardly possible to doubt that
He would, have been burnt alive or crucified again. What the Latin
Church preserved was not the religion of Christ, which lived on by its
inherent indestructibility, but parts of the Aristotelian and Platonic
philosophies, distorted and petrified by scholasticism, a vast quantity
of purely Pagan superstitions, and the _arcana imperii_ of Roman
Caesarism. The normal end of Scholasticism is a mum