e; yet they prove that the spirit is not
dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
coming age steadily before it?

II

MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
memory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after
this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
the gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than
explicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet
lodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal
Catholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,
too much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too
weak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern
liberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say
intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its