Judges or the edibility of
Jonah," the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and
intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a
theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and
is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland. What does it mean?
Is it possible to understand such a perversion of mind?

His intellectual position, as he states it, is a simple one--for the
present.

He asks us, Is Truth something which we are ordered to keep, or
something which we are ordered to find?

Is our business holding the fort? Or is it looking for the Pole?

The traditionalist can say, "Here is the Truth, written down for you and
me in black and white; I mean to keep it, and defend it from attack;
will you rally round it? Will you help me?"

He shows you the modernist wandering in the wilderness of speculative
theology looking for the Truth which the traditionalist, safe, warm, and
secure of eternal life, keeps whole and undefiled in his fortress.

It is like a fairy tale.

How simple it sounds! But when Father Knox looks in the glass does he
not see its staring fallacy?

Did he keep the Truth of his boyhood--the Truth of his father's church?
Did he not go outside the fortress of Evangelicalism and seek for Truth
in the fortress of Anglo-Catholicism? And here again, did he not break
faith, and once more seek Truth outside its walls? If Truth is not
something to be found, how is it that he is not still in the house of
his fathers?

Does he fail to see that this argument not merely explains but
vindicates the rejection of Christ by the Jews? They had their
tradition, a tradition of immemorial sanctity, perhaps the noblest
tradition of any people in the world.

Does he not also see that it destroys the _raison d'etre_ of the
Christian missionary, and would reduce the whole world to a state of
what Nietzsche called Chinaism and profound mediocrity?

Every religion in history, from the worship of Osiris, Serapis, and
Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African
forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the
loyalty of its disciples. What logic, what magic of holiness, could
destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation
of the devil?

The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is "to
resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is
told, just as he is expected