soberness,
and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is
not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
another world. The _mise-en-scene_ has changed immensely. The gospel
has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel
has been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater
resemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;
but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the
natural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the
blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural
human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full
of pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and
certainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.

Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a