he evangelical modernist, who accepts almost
everything in the Higher Criticism, but holds to Christ as an
incarnation of the Divine purpose, an incarnation, if you will, of God,
all we can know of God limited by His human body, as God we must suppose
is not limited, but still God. And, finally, there is the Catholic
modernist, who believes in a Church, who makes the sacraments his centre
of religion, and exalts Christianity to the head of all the mystery
religions which have played a part in the evolution of the human race.
This is not likely to be the prevailing type of modernism.

It looks as if the main body of modern opinion is moving in the
direction followed by the second of these schools--the evangelical. Here
is preserved all that great range of deep feeling and all that fine
energy of unselfish earnestness which have given to Christianity the
most effectual of its impulses. A man may still worship Christ, and
still make obedience to the Will of Christ the chief passion or object
of his existence, although he no longer believes that Jesus was either
born out of the order of nature or died to turn away the vengeance of
God from a world which had sinned itself beyond the reach of infinite
love.

Like Goethe, such a man will say: "As soon as the pure doctrine and love
of Christ are comprehended in their true nature, and have become a
living principle, we shall feel ourselves great and free as human
beings, and not attach special importance to a degree more or less in
the outward forms of religion."

The critics of modernism do not seem able, for some reason, to grasp a
truth which has been apparent all down the ages, a truth so old that it
is almost entitled to be regarded as a tradition, and so widely held
that it is almost worthy to be called catholic, namely, the truth that
Jesus loses none of His power over human history so long as He abides a
living principle in the hearts of individual men. So long as He
expresses for mankind the Character of God and reveals to mankind the
nature of God's purpose, so long as men love Him as they love no other,
and set themselves to make His spirit tell, first in their lives and
after that in the world about them, does it greatly matter whether they
speak of His divinity or His uniqueness, whether they accept definitions
concerning Him (framed by men in the dark ages) or go about to do His
will with no definitions in their mind at all beyond the intellectual
conviction tha