PART III
THE REMEDIES FOR MODERNISM

I. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDIES
II. CHOICE OF THE DIRECTORS AND PROFESSORS FOR SEMINARIES AND CATHOLIC INSTITUTES
III. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDENTS

Q. With what vigilance are candidates for Holy Orders to be chosen?

A. Equal vigilance and severity are to be used in examining and selecting candidates for Holy Orders. Far, far from the clergy be the love of novelty! God hateth the proud and the obstinate mind.

Q. What will be required in future as a condition for validly conferring the doctorate of theology and canon law?

A. For the future the doctorate of theology and canon law must never be conferred on anyone who has not first of all made the regular course of scholastic philosophy; if conferred, it shall be held as null and void.

Q. What rules laid down for clerics, both secular and regular, in Italy, are henceforth extended to all countries?

A. The rules laid down in 1896 by the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars for the clerics, both secular and regular, of Italy, concerning the frequenting of the Universities, We now decree to be extended to all nations.

Q. What prohibition is added by the Sovereign Pontiff?

A. Clerics and priests inscribed in a Catholic Institute or University must not in the future follow in civil Universities those courses for which there are chairs in the Catholic Institutes to which they belong. If this has been permitted anywhere in the past, We ordain that it be not allowed for the future.

Q. What must the Bishops do who preside over the direction of such Universities and Institutes?

A. Let the Bishops who form the governing board of such Catholic Universities or Institutes watch with all care that these Our commands be constantly observed.

IV. RULES CONCERNING THE READING OF BAD BOOKS

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PART III
THE REMEDIES FOR MODERNISM

I. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDIES
II. CHOICE OF THE DIRECTORS AND PROFESSORS FOR SEMINARIES AND CATHOLIC INSTITUTES

Q. With what prudence, and according to what rules, must professors for seminaries and Catholic Universities be chosen?

A. All these prescriptions, both Our own and those of Our Predecessor, are to be kept in view whenever there is question of choosing directors and professors for seminaries and Catholic Universities. Anyone who in any way is found to be tainted with Modernism is to be excluded without compunction from these offices, whether of government or of teaching, and those who already occupy them are to be removed. The same policy is to be adopted towards those who openly or secretly lend countenance to Modernism, either by extolling the Modernists and excusing their culpable conduct, or by carping at scholasticism, and the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, or by refusing obedience to ecclesiastical authority in any of its depositaries; and towards those who show a love of novelty in history, archaeology, Biblical exegesis; and, finally, towards those who neglect the sacred sciences or appear to prefer to them the secular. In all this question of studies you cannot be too watchful or too constant, but most of all in the choice of professors; for, as a rule, the students are modelled after the pattern of their masters. Strong in the conscious ness of your duty, act always in this matter with prudence and with vigor.

III. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDENTS

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PART III
THE REMEDIES FOR MODERNISM

I. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDIES

Q. What does the Holy Father ordain on the subject of philosophy?

A. He says: In the first place, with regard to studies, We will and strictly ordain that scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences.

Q. Following Leo XIII., what reservation does Pius X. make in his prescription?

A. It goes without saying that ” if anything is met with among the scholastic doctors which may be regarded as something investigated with an excess of subtlety, or taught without sufficient consideration; anything which is not in keeping with the certain results of later times; anything, in short, which is altogether destitute of probability, We have no desire whatever to propose it for the imitation of present generations.” (Leo XIII., Encycl. Mterni Patris.)

Q. What scholastic philosophy is prescribed in seminaries and religious Institutes?

A. Let it be clearly understood above all things that, when We prescribe scholastic philosophy, We understand chiefly that which the Angelic Doctor has bequeathed to us, and We therefore declare that all the ordinances of Our Predecessor on this subject continue fully in force; and, as far as may be necessary, We do decree anew, and confirm, and order that they shall be strictly observed by all. In seminaries where they have been neglected, it will be for the Bishops to exact and require their observance in the future; and let this apply also to the Superiors of religious Orders.

Q. Would it be a great disadvantage to set aside St. Thomas?

A. We admonish professors to bear well in mind that they cannot set aside St. Thomas, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave disadvantage.

Q. In what words does Pius X. recommend the study of theology?

A. On this philosophical foundation the theological edifice is to be carefully raised. Promote the study of theology by all means in your power, so that your clerics on leaving the seminaries may carry with them a deep admiration and love of it, and always find in it a source of delight. For ” in the vast and varied abundance of studies opening before the mind desirous of truth, it is known to everyone that theology occupies such a commanding place that, according to an ancient adage of the wise, it is the duty of the other arts and sciences to serve it, and to wait upon it after the manner of handmaidens.” ( Leo XIII., Lett. Ap. In Magna, December 10, 1889.)

Q. Does not the Sovereign Pontiff, all the same, praise the theologians who teach positive theology?

A. We will add that We deem worthy of praise those who, with full respect for tradition, the Fathers, and the ecclesiastical magisterium, endeavour, with well-balanced judgment, and guided by Catholic principles (which is not always the case), to illustrate positive theology by throwing upon it the light of true history.

Q. In teaching positive theology, what is to be avoided?

A. It is certainly necessary that positive theology should be held in greater appreciation than it has been in the past, but this must be done without detriment to scholastic theology; and those are to be disapproved as Modernists who exalt positive theology in such a way as to seem to despise the scholastic.

Q. According to what law ought the study of natural sciences to be regulated?

A. With regard to secular studies, let it suffice to recall here what Our Predecessor has admirably said: ” Apply yourselves energetically to the study of natural sciences, in which department the things that have been so brilliantly discovered and so usefully applied, to the admiration of the present age, will be the object of praise and commendation to those who come after us.” (Leo XIII., Alloc., March 7, 1880.) But this is to be done without interfering with sacred studies, as Our same Predecessor prescribed in these most weighty words: ” If you carefully search for the cause of those errors you will find that it lies in the fact that in these days, when the natural sciences absorb so much study, the more severe and lofty studies have been proportionately neglected some of them have almost passed into oblivion, some of them are pursued in a half-hearted or superficial way, and, sad to say, now that the splendour of the former estate is dimmed, they have been disfigured by perverse doc trines and monstrous errors.” (Loc. cit) We ordain, therefore, that the study of natural sciences in the seminaries be carried out according to the law.

II. CHOICE OF THE DIRECTORS AND PROFESSORS FOR SEMINARIES AND CATHOLIC INSTITUTES

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PART III
THE REMEDIES FOR MODERNISM

Q. What did Leo XIII. do against the errors of the Modernists?

A. Against this host of grave errors, and its secret and open advance, Our Predecessor, Leo XIII., of happy memory, worked strenuously, both in his words and his acts, especially as regards the study of the Bible.

Q. Were the Modernists put to rout by these words and these acts?

A. But, as we have seen, the Modernists are not easily deterred by such weapons. With an affectation of great submission and respect, they proceeded to twist the words of the Pontiff to their own sense, while they described his action as directed against others than themselves. Thus the evil has gone on increasing from day to day.

Q. What determination was our Holy Father, Pius X., obliged to come to?

A. He tells us: We, therefore, have decided to suffer no longer delay, and to adopt measures which are more efficacious.

Q. In what terms does he call on Bishops, pastors of souls, educators, and the head Superiors of religious Institutes?

A. We exhort and conjure you to see to it that in this most grave matter no one shall be in a position to say that you have been in the slightest degree wanting in vigilance, zeal, or firmness. And what We ask of you and expect of you, We ask and expect also of all other pastors of souls, of all educators and professors of clerics, and in a very special way of the Superiors of religious communities.

 

I. RULES RELATIVE TO STUDIES.

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PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

I. MORAL CAUSES: CURIOSITY AND PRIDE
II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES
III. ARTIFICES OF THE MODERNISTS FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THEIR ERRORS
1. NEGATIVE MEANS
2. POSITIVE MEANS

Q. Are the Modernists zealous to enlist new recruits?

A. What efforts do they not make to win new recruits!

Q. What are their principal means of conquest?

A. They seize upon professorships in the seminaries and Universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. In sermons from the pulpit they disseminate their doctrines, although possibly in utterances which are veiled. In congresses they express their teachings more openly. In their social gatherings they introduce them and commend them to others. Under their own names and under pseudonyms they publish numbers of books, newspapers, reviews, and sometimes one and the same writer adopts a variety of pseudonyms, to trap the incautious reader into believing in a multitude of Modernist writers. In short, with feverish activity they leave nothing untried in act, speech, and writing.

Q. With what result are all these Modernist artifices employed?

A. With what result? We have to deplore the spectacle of many young men, once full of promise and capable of rendering great services to the Church, now gone astray.

Q. What is there that cannot but cause us sorrow on the part of certain Catholics who are not as yet thorough going Modernists?

A. It is also a subject of grief to Us that many others, while they certainly do not go so far as the former, have yet been so infected by breathing a poisoned atmosphere, as to think, speak, and write with a degree of laxity which ill becomes a Catholic.

Q. Are these Catholics, who allow themselves to be contaminated by Modernism, to be found only among the laity?

A. They are to be found among the laity, and in the ranks of the clergy.

Q. But is it possible that there are some even in the religious Orders?

A. They are not wanting even in the last place where one might expect to meet them in religious communities.

Q. How do these Catholics, laymen, priests, and religious, who are all more or less tainted with Modernism, treat of Biblical questions?

A. If they treat of Biblical questions, it is upon Modernist principles.

Q. How do they write history?

A. If they write history, they carefully, and with ill-concealed satisfaction, drag into the light, on the plea of telling the whole truth, everything that appears to cast a stain upon the Church.

Q. How do they act with regard to pious popular traditions and venerable relics?

A. Under the sway of certain a priori conceptions, they destroy as far as they can the pious traditions of the people, and bring into disrespect certain relics highly venerable from their antiquity.

Q. At bottom, what is it that impels them to break thus with the ancient traditions?

A. They are possessed by the empty desire of having their names upon the lips of the public, and they know they would never succeed in this were they to say only what has always been said by all men.

Q. But have not these Catholics, who are more or less Modernists, good intentions in breaking with the traditions of the past?

A. It may be that they have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church.

Q. What is the fact?

A. In reality they only offend both, less perhaps by their works in themselves than by the spirit in which they write, and by the encouragement they thus give to the aims of the Modernists.

PART III – THE REMEDIES FOR MODERNISM 

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PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

I. MORAL CAUSES: CURIOSITY AND PRIDE
II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES
III. ARTIFICES OF THE MODERNISTS FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THEIR ERRORS
1. NEGATIVE MEANS

Q. Are there, then, things which the Modernists consider as obstacles to be removed?

A. They recognize that three chief difficulties stand in their way.

Q. What are these three obstacles which the Modernists strive to remove?

A. The scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and Tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church.

Q. Do the Modernists really wage war on these three things?

A. On these they wage unrelenting war.

Q. What weapons do they use against scholasticism?

A. Against scholastic philosophy and theology they use the weapons of ridicule and contempt.

Q. What causes the Modernist to wage war on scholastic philosophy?

A. Ignorance or fear, or both.  (SylL, Prop. 13.)

Q. Do dislike and hatred of scholasticism go hand- in-hand with Modernism ?

A. Certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method.

Q. As to their hatred of scholastic philosophy, what grave warning are we entitled to give to the Modernists?

A. Let the Modernists and their admirers remember the proposition condemned by Pius IX. : ” The method and principles which have served the ancient doctors of scholasticism when treating of theology no longer correspond with the exigencies of our time, or the progress of science.” (SylL, Prop. 13.)

Q. In their war against scholastic philosophy, what do the Modernists do with regard to the second obstacle, which, as we have said, is Tradition?

A. They exercise all their ingenuity in an effort to weaken the force and falsify the character of Tradition, so as to rob it of all its weight and authority.

Q. What law of the Second Council of Nicea ought true Catholics always to call to mind in this matter of Tradition?

A. For Catholics nothing will remove the authority of the Second Council of Nicea, where it condemns those ” who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind … or endeavour by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church.”

Q. And further, as to this question of Tradition, what was the declaration of the Fourth Council of Constantinople?

A. ” We therefore profess to preserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, by the holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by every one of those divine interpreters, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.”

Q. Is not respect for Tradition inscribed also in the profession of faith?

A. The Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV. and Pius IX., ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: “I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.”

Q. Respecting Tradition so little, how do the Modernists treat the holy Fathers of the Church?

A. The Modernists pass judgment on the holy Fathers of the Church even as they do upon Tradition.

Q. With what overweening audacity do they speak of the Fathers ?

A. With consummate temerity they assure the public that the Fathers, while personally most worthy of all veneration, were entirely ignorant of history and criticism, for which they are only excusable on account of the time in which they lived.

Q. At war with scholastic philosophy and Tradition, what is the third obstacle the Modernists endeavour to remove from their path?

A. Finally, the Modernists try in every way to diminish and weaken the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium itself.

Q. How do they proceed against the ecclesiastical magisterium?

A. By sacrilegiously falsifying its origin, character, and rights, and by freely repeating the calumnies of its adversaries.

Q. As regards this war of the Modernists against the ecclesiastical magisterium, can we not apply to them former condemnations?

A. To the entire band of Modernists may be applied those words which Our Predecessor sorrowfully wrote : ” To bring contempt and odium on the mystic Spouse of Christ, who is the true light, the children of darkness have been wont to cast in her face before the world a stupid calumny, and, perverting the meaning and force of things and words, to depict her as the friend of darkness and ignorance, and the enemy of
light, science, and progress.”  (Motu Proprio, Ut Mysticvm, March 14, 1891.)

Q. Such being the Modernists hatred of the Church, what is their attitude with regard to Catholics who defend her?

A. This being so, there is little reason to wonder that the Modernists vent all their bitterness and hatred on Catholics who zealously fight the battles of the Church.

Q. Does the ill-will of the Modernists towards Catholics who are faithful to the Church go as far as to insult them?

A. There is no species of insult which they do not heap upon them.

Q. What is their favourite insult against Catholics?

A. Their usual course is to charge them with ignorance or obstinacy.

Q. If the Catholic who defends the Church is a learned man, what tactics do the Modernists pursue in his case?

A. When an adversary rises up against them with an erudition and force that render him redoubtable, they seek to make a conspiracy of silence around him, to nullify the effects of his attack.

Q. Is such conduct at least palliated by a like conduct on the part of the Modernists towards their own?

A. This policy towards Catholics is the more invidious in that they belaud with admiration which knows no bounds the writers who range themselves on their side.

Q. What, especially, is their way of dealing with regard to works filled full of novelties?

A. They are found hailing their works, exuding novelty in every page, with a chorus of applause.

Q. By what sign do they know that an author is more or less learned?

A. For them the scholarship of a writer is in direct proportion to the recklessness of his attacks on antiquity, and of his efforts to undermine tradition and the ecclesiastical magisterium.

Q. If a Modernist be condemned by the Church, have the rest of them the audacity still to stand by him?

A. When one of their number falls under the condemnations of the Church, the rest of them, to the disgust of good Catholics, gather round him, loudly and publicly applaud him, and hold him up in veneration as almost a martyr for truth.

Q. How is it that the young allow themselves to be unsettled by all this noise which the Modernists make?

A. The young, excited and confused by all this clamour of praise and abuse, some of them afraid of being branded as ignorant, others ambitious to rank among the learned, and both classes goaded internally by curiosity and pride, not unfrequently surrender and give themselves up to Modernism.

Q. But is not this method of winning over the young to Modernism, by means of noise and audacity, one of those stratagems, mentioned above, which they use to conquer?

A. Here we have already some of the artifices employed by Modernists to exploit their wares.

 

2. POSITIVE MEANS

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PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

I. MORAL CAUSES: CURIOSITY AND PRIDE
II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES
III. ARTIFICES OF THE MODERNISTS FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THEIR ERRORS

Q. Are the Modernists zealous in propagating their pernicious system?

A. Would that they had but displayed less zeal and energy in propagating it! But such is their activity and such their unwearying labour on behalf of their cause, that one cannot but be pained to see them waste such energy in endeavouring to ruin the Church, when they might have been of such service to her had their efforts been better directed.

Q. Do the Modernists employ artifice in this active propaganda to spread abroad their system?

A. Yes; and their artifices to delude men s minds are of two kinds.

Q. What are these two kinds of artifices?

A. The first to remove obstacles from their path, the second to devise and apply actively and patiently every resource that can serve their purpose.

 

1. NEGATIVE MEANS

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PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

I. MORAL CAUSES: CURIOSITY AND PRIDE
II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSE

Q. In addition to these two moral causes, curiosity and pride, what is the chief intellectual cause of Modernism?

A. If we pass on from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first and the chief which presents itself is ignorance.

Q. Ignorance! in the, Modernists who think themselves so learned / can that really be true?

A. Yes, these very Modernists who seek to be esteemed as Doctors of the Church, who speak so loftily of modern philosophy, and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the one with all its false glamour, precisely because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought and to refute sophistry.

Q. Has, then, this false modern philosophy, with which the Modernists, in their ignorance of scholasticism, have allowed themselves to be taken, given birth to Modernism?

A. Their whole system, containing as it does errors so many and so great, has been born of the union between faith and false philosophy.

 

III. ARTIFICES OF THE MODERNISTS FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THEIR ERRORS

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PART II
THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

Q. The better to understand what Modernism is, and to find the fitting remedies for it, what must now be done?

A. To penetrate still deeper into the meaning of Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for so deep a sore, it behoves Us to investigate the causes which have engendered it, and which foster its growth.

CHAPTER I

I. MORAL CAUSES : CURIOSITY AND PRIDE

Q. What is the proximate and immediate cause of Modernism?

A. That the proximate and immediate cause consists in an error of the mind cannot be open to doubt.

Q. Whence, in its turn, comes this perversity of mind which is the proximate cause of Modernism, or, in other words, what are the remote causes of Modernism?

A. We recognize that the remote causes may be reduced to two curiosity and pride.

Q. Is curiosity really a cause of error?

A. Curiosity by itself, if not prudently regulated, suffices to account for all errors. Such is the opinion of Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI., who wrote: “A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty, when against the warning of the Apostle it seeks to know beyond what it is meant to know, and when, relying too much on itself, it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church, wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error.”  (Ep. Encycl. Singulari nos, 1 Kal. Jul., 1834.)

Q. What evil is it that, even more than curiosity, Hinds the mind and precipitates into error?

A. It is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and lead it into error.

Q. Has pride really entered into the doctrines of the Modernists?

A. Pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and lurking in its every aspect.

Q. Can you describe to us the different aspects of Modernism which betray its pride?

A. It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption, ” We are not as the rest of men,” and which, lest they should seem as other men, leads them to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind. It is pride which arouses in them the spirit of disobedience, and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves, and that they are found to be utterly wanting in respect for authority, even for the supreme authority.

Q. Is there, then, no truer cause of Modernism than pride?

A. Truly there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride.

Q. Would a Catholic priest or layman, if overcome by pride, be inevitably a subject for Modernism?

A. When a Catholic layman or a priest forgets the precept of the Christian life which obliges us to renounce ourselves if we would follow Christ, and neglects to tear pride from his heart, then it is he who most of all is a fully ripe subject for the errors of Modernism.

Q. What duty is, therefore, incumbent on Bishops with regard to these priests full of pride?

A. For this reason, Venerable Brethren, it will be your first duty to resist such victims of pride, to employ them only in the lowest and obscurest offices. The higher they try to rise, the lower let them be placed, so that the lowliness of their position may limit their power of causing damage.

Q. Is it not also the duty of directors of seminaries to keep those seminarists from becoming priests who are infected with the spirit of pride?

A. Examine most carefully your young clerics by yourselves and by the directors of your seminaries, and when you find the spirit of pride amongst them, reject them without compunction from the priesthood.

Q. Up to the, present has this duty of keeping those infected with the spirit of pride from becoming priests been faithfully enough fulfilled?

A. Would to God that this had always been done with the vigilance and constancy which were required!

II. INTELLECTUAL CAUSES

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PART I
THE ERRORS OF THE MODERNISTS

CHAPTER VIII

CRITICISM OF THE MODERNIST SYSTEM THE RENDEZVOUS OF ALL THE HERESIES THE WAY TO ATHEISM

Q. Why have we set forth at such, length the Modernist doctrines?

A. It may, perhaps, seem to some that We have dwelt at too great length on this exposition of the doctrines of the Modernists, but it was necessary that We should do so.

Q. Why was so long an exposition necessary?

A. In order to meet their customary charge that We do not understand their ideas.

Q. And for what further motive?

A. To show that their system does not consist in scattered and unconnected theories, but, as it were, in a closely connected whole, so that it is not possible to admit one without admitting all.

Q. Do these two reasons not explain why we have given a didactic turn to our exposition of Modernism?

A. For this reason, too, We have had to give to this exposition a somewhat didactic form, and not to shrink from employing certain unwonted terms which the Modernists have brought into use.

Q. How can one, in one word, define Modernism?

A. Now, with Our eyes fixed upon the whole system, no one will be surprised that We should define it to be the synthesis* of all the heresies.

Q. Why do you define Modernism to be the rendezvous of all the heresies?

A. Undoubtedly, were anyone to attempt the task of collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the Faith, and to concentrate into one the sap and substance of them all, he could not succeed in doing so better than the Modernists have done.

Q. Is it enough to affirm that, by their multiplied errors, the Modernists would destroy the Catholic religion?

A. Nay, they have gone farther than this, for, as We have already intimated, their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion.

Q. Must not the, rationalists, then, smile upon the Modernists?

A. The rationalists are not wanting in their applause, and the most frank and sincere amongst them congratulate themselves on having found in the Modernists the most valuable of all allies.

Q. How can you show us that the Modernists are the most powerful auxiliaries of the rationalists?

A. To do so, let us turn for a moment to that most disastrous doctrine of agnosticism.

Q. Having, by agnosticism, barred every avenue leading to God, how do the Modernists claim to approach Him?

A. By it every avenue to God on the side of the intellect is barred to man, while a better way is supposed to be opened from the side of a certain sense of the soul and action.

Q. Has such a contention any chance of succeeding?

A. Who does not see how mistaken is such a contention?

Q. Why?

A. For the sense of the soul is the response to the action of the thing which the intellect or the outward senses set before it.

Q. Since, in order to draw near to God, sentiment is led either by the intelligence or by the senses, what will inevitably follow if the Modernists take away the guidance of the intelligence?

A. Take away the intelligence, and man, already inclined to follow the senses, becomes their slave.

Q. Is not this attempt to approach God by agnostic sentiment idle also from another point of view?

A. It is doubly mistaken, from another point of view, for all these fantasies of the religious sense will never be able to destroy common sense, and common sense tells us that emotion and everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to the discovery of truth.

Q. Of what truth do you speak when you say that the emotions of the soul hinder the discovery of truth?

A. We speak of truth in itself.

Q. Is there not a simulacrum of truth, the discovery of which is facilitated by the emotions, and what is to be thought of it?

A. That other purely subjective truth, the fruit of the internal sense and action, if it serves its purpose for the play of words, is of no benefit to the man who wants above all things to know whether outside himself there is a God into whose hands he is one day to fall.

Q. With agnosticism for its starting-point, religious sentiment has no basis. Now, to what have the Modernists recourse to find it a basis?

A. The Modernists call in experience, to eke out their system.

Q. But what does this experience add to that sense of the soul?

A. Absolutely nothing beyond a certain intensity and a proportionate deepening of the conviction of the reality of the object. But these two will never make the sense of the soul into anything but sense, nor will they alter its nature, which is liable to deception when the intelligence is not there to guide it ; on the contrary, they but confirm and strengthen this nature, for the more intense the sense is, the more it is really sense.

Q. Is there not great need of prudence and of learning in this matter of religious sense and experience?

A. As we are here dealing with religious sense and the experience involved in it, it is known to you how necessary in such a matter is prudence, and the learning by which prudence is guided. You know it from your own dealings with souls, and especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates; you know it also from your reading of works of ascetical theology.

Q. But are these ascetical works good guides in such matters?

A. Yes; they are works for which the Modernists have but little esteem, but which testify to a science and a solidity far greater than theirs, and to a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing.

Q. Have you, then, but a very poor opinion of the religious experiences of the Modernists?

A. It seems to Us nothing short of madness, or, at the least, consummate temerity, to accept for true, and without investigation, these incomplete experiences which are the vaunt of the Modernist.

Q. How can we frame an argumentum ad hominem against the Modernists, and turn against themselves the proof they claim to find in religious experience?

A. Let us for a moment put the question: If experiences have so much force and value in their estimation, why do they not attach equal weight to the experience that so many thousands of Catholics have that the Modernists are on the wrong path? Is it that the Catholic experiences are the only ones which are false and deceptive?

Q. Taking up again the thread of our argument, we ask, what does the majority of men think of this sense and this experience?

A. The vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God.

Q. What, then, remains?

A. Atheism and the absence of all religion.

Q. If the Modernists teaching on religious experience leads to Atheism, do they not find in their doctrine of symbolism something to avert that danger?

A. Certainly it is not the doctrine of symbolism that will save us from this. For if all the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are nothing more than mere symbols of God, will not the very name of God or of Divine personality be also a symbol, and if this be admitted, the personality of God will become a matter of doubt, and the gate will be opened to Pantheism.

Q. Is the Modernist doctrine of symbolism the only doctrine of theirs that leads to Pantheism?

A. To Pantheism pure and simple that other doctrine of the divine immanence leads directly.

Q. Can you show by some irrefutable argument how this consequence follows?

A. This is the question which We ask: Does or does not this immanence leave God distinct from man? If it does, in what does it differ from the Catholic doctrine, and why does it reject the doctrine of external revelation? If it does not, it is Pantheism. Now, the doctrine of immanence in the Modernist acceptation holds and professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means Pantheism.

Q. Does this pantheistic conclusion follow from any other of the Modernist doctrines?

A. The distinction which Modernists make between science and faith leads to the same conclusion.

Q. Will you prove this to us by rigorous reasoning?

A. The object of science, they say, is the reality of the knowable; the object of faith, on the contrary, is the reality of the unknowable. Now, what makes the unknowable unknowable is the fact that there is no proportion between its object and the intellect a defect of proportion which nothing whatever, even in the doctrine of the Modernist, can suppress. Hence the unknowable remains, and will eternally remain, unknowable to the believer as well as to the philosopher. Therefore, if any religion at all is possible, it can only be the religion of an unknowable reality. And why this religion might not be that soul of the universe, of which certain rationalists speak, is something which certainly does not seem to Us apparent.

Q. What ultimate conclusion have we the right to come to?

A. These reasons suffice to show superabundantly by how many roads Modernism leads to Atheism and to the annihilation of all religion.

Q. What are the stages in this descent of the human mind towards the negation of all religion?

A. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path ; that of Modernism makes the second ; Atheism will make the next.

* The Latin word is conlectus, and the translation were better, perhaps, as in the French, rendezvous. There is, indeed, a synthesis, but it is the Pope rather than the Modernists who makes it. J. F.

PART II – THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM

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