PART I
THE ERRORS OF THE MODERNISTS
CHAPTER II
THE MODERNIST AS BELIEVER
I. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
II. TRADITION
Q. Do not the Modernists extend the principle of religious experience also to tradition?
A. ‘There is yet another element in this part of their teaching which is absolutely contrary to Catholic truth. For what is laid down as to experience is also applied with destructive effect to tradition, which has always been maintained by the Catholic Church.’
Q. What, then, do the Modernists understand by tradition?
A. ‘Tradition, as understood by the Modernists, is a communication with others of an original experience, through preaching, by means of the intellectual formula.’
Q. What virtue do they attribute to this intellectual formula in relation to preaching?
A. ‘To this formula, in addition to its representative value, they attribute a species of suggestive efficacy.’
Q. And on whom does this suggestive virtue act?
A. ‘Firstly, in the believer by stimulating the religious sense, should it happen to have grown sluggish, and by renewing the experience once acquired; and, secondly, in those who do not yet believe, by awakening in them for the first time the religious sense and producing the experience.’
Q. Is it thus, then, that religious experience engenders tradition?
A. ‘In this way is religious experience spread abroad among the nations; and not merely among contemporaries by preaching, but among future generations both by books and by oral transmission from one to another.’
Q. By what test do the Modernists judge of the truth of a tradition?
A. ‘Sometimes this communication of religious experience takes root and thrives, at other times it withers at once and dies. For the Modernists, to live is a proof of truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing.’
Q. If every religion that is living is true, what further conclusion must we come to?
A. ‘That all existing religions are equally true, for otherwise they would not survive.’