position, what is the profit of their laborious toil in the field of scientific scholarship, biblical, historical, doctrinal? They are raising a mere castle in the air, their apparent scientific results are after all nothing but a mirage. Their cause is surely not worth suffering for, and Loisy and Tyrrell were the most deluded of men.

The last point we shall consider, and that very briefly, is the attitude of Newman and the Modernists toward the relation of church and state. The Programme very plainly admits the latter's acceptance of the principle of separation of these two social institutions, that each may be free from present complications and acquire greater efficiency each for its own tasks. In particular, they wish to see the church freed fron the temptations leading to political corruption, being strongly convinced that for the church to assume a purely spiritual leadership would mean the enhancing of its moral power over men. Underlying this desire for separation is a strong demand for an emancipated democracy in both civil and ecclesiastical institutions. How little there is in Newman to stir the heart of the common man! Already we have referred to his well-known hostility to political liberalism; the Tractarian Movement took its rise in no small degree as a reaction against the progress of political liberalism; the Revolution of 1830, which drove out of power in France as bigoted a clerical régime as could well be imagined, Newman referred to as "the triumph of irreligion." The attempt has been made by recent defenders of the encyclical to interpret the "liberalism" which the encyclical and the papacy in general condemn, as being not in any sense the liberalism of the political world, but, using the phrase of Newman, "the anti-dogmatic principle." Newman himself, however, used the phrase, "the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments.” It may be taking an advantage of Newman to argue from the Syllabus errorum of 1864, for Newman never could enthuse over that, but the only group of articles definitely condemning liberalism by that name (Errores, qui ad liberalismum hodiernum referuntur) are specifically concerned with the civil establishment of religion. In the civil-ecclesiastical struggles going on in France and Italy and Spain, not to mention other countries, no Modernist could 19 Letters and Correspondence, I, 233.

adhere to his principles and at the same time conform to Newman's conception of the Catholic's duties; and it must be remembered that in the conflict in those lands the call of citizenship is for something more than the mere holding of an academic theory.

We have thus noted several reasons why we find ourselves unable to place Newman among the Modernists. The attitude of the Roman Catholic church would not be modified an iota if it could be proved that Newman was a Modernist, and, as all his works in their final form are submitted to the authority of the church, he himself would be free from anathema even were his writings or any part of them to be placed upon the Index. But John Henry Newman played such a part in the religious history of England in the nineteenth century and his interpretation of Roman Catholicism has been so influential upon the thinking of so many in his own country and in America; moreover, he is such an interesting subject from the standpoint of religious psychology, and has attained so representative a position, that such a question as we have been considering acquires something more than a merely biographical significance. Was the Catholicism of Newman after all one that the Roman Catholic church today repudiates? Listen to what Father Tyrrell, the translator of the Programme, has said elsewhere:20

The solidarity of Newmanism with Modernism cannot be denied. Newman might have shuddered at his progeny, but it is none the less his. He is the founder of a method which has led to results which he could not have foreseen or desired. The growth of his system has made its divergence from scholasticism clearer every day. If scholasticism is essential to Catholicism, Newman must go overboard and the defiance hurled in the face of history at the Vatican Council and reiterated with emphasis by Pius X is superabundantly justified.

Tyrrell does not here call Newman a Modernist; he rather implies that Newman would at least have shrunk from becoming one; but he argues that if Newman had carried through his interpretation of Catholicism consistently, the breach with scholasticism would have been inevitable and Newman would have been forced to break with his logic or place himself among the Modernists. We have seen, however, how Newman shifts 20 Hibbert Journal, January, 1908.

his position at the crisis and is inconsistent in his logic. Moreover, this quotation represents the views of one who became a Modernist largely through English influences, where Newman's influence is strong but doubtless overemphasized; Modernists in other lands have felt it very little if at all. The real forbears of Modernism are not Newman or any of his contemporaries in Roman Catholicism, but rather the founders of modern scientific methods. Modernists should trace their descent through a line strong in moral and intellectual freedom, from Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton; in their special interest in historical research they are the descendants of Laurentius Valla, who broke down the "catholic" tradition of the Donation of Constantine; of Freudenberger and Kopp, who dissolved the Tell legends (but Swiss patriotism still survives); and of Ranke, who gave new impetus to critical investigation of the sources of historical knowledge; while their contemporary intellectual kinsfolk are that large number of Christian scholars who believe that the Christian religion must meet the tests of scientific investigation at every point, at least where it makes any use of science either in polemics or in apologetics and wherever the church makes any direct claim upon the reason of man.

A MISTAKE IN STRATEGY1

PROFESSOR JAMES BISSETT PRATT
Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.

So much has been said and written first and last about the present religious crisis that the subject has become certainly trite if not positively tedious. Yet in spite of all that has been told us, there still remain many things to say; and I hope I shall be pardoned if I try to say one of these. The present situation has often been likened to a military campaign between the forces of Christianity and its opponents; and from that point of view I should like to draw attention to what seems to me a very considerable strategical mistake on the part of the leaders-and of the rank and file-of the Christian hosts. To put the matter as briefly as may be, it seems to me that we are laying Christianity open unnecessarily to attack by holding to positions which have ceased to be of real importance merely for the sake of sentiment and conservatism. In short, to drop the metaphor, we are allowing our opponents to identify Christianity—and we ourselves are officially identifying it—with doctrines which have ceased to be vital to us or to the world of modern thought.

A current opinion, often voiced, insists that most of the danger to Christianity today is due to the fact that some of the leaders of thought have been saying too openly and plainly what they believe. Possibly there may be some truth in this; but I am convinced that the greater source of peril lies in the fact that most of us Christians have failed to say what we believe plainly enough. As I look back upon the story of dead faiths and consider the causes of their mortality, I do not recall one that was destroyed by the arguments of its enemies. Religions do not die because they are refuted; they die because they become unim

This paper was read before the Pastors' Institute of Berkshire County at Pittsfield, Mass., on October 27, 1909, and a little later before the Philosophical Union of Williams College, under the title, "Sincerity in Religion."

portant. They drop out silently and unnoticed in the night; not because they are proved untrue, but because no one thinks it worth his while to prove them untrue. They perish because their former adherents have ceased any longer to take them seriously.

Now unless we would be guilty of an almost unpardonably blind optimism, we must, as it seems to me, recognize that the present situation in Christianity shows at least some of the symptoms which in other and older faiths have proved to be the heralds of decline What are the causes of this state of things? Doubtless there are several, but one cause I am sure is this: the people are ceasing to take Christianity seriously. And if we ask ourselves sincerely why this is so, I think that we shall find one reason to be that we Christians have allowed Christianity to become identified, in the mind of the world, with its less important as well as with its essential elements. The truth is, there is a great deal in traditional Christianity which we do not ourselves take seriously, and the world, judging by our actions rather than by our professions, sees that we do not.

Ever since the days of Professor Bain it has been a commonplace of psychology that the ultimate test of belief is action. If you want to know what a man really believes, see how he acts. A man's conduct is a better expression of his belief than are his words. Judged by this standard, the weekly repetition of many of the articles of our creeds is a rather astonishing spectacle. For the truth is we do not really believe what we verbally profess. Down in the bottom of our hearts we know that many of the things we allow others to suppose we believe about religion rest on foundations so insecure that in any other field we should give them up at once and either deny them or confess our ignorance. We should be ashamed to hold and proclaim views on science or government half so outgrown as are many of the doctrines we feel bound to cling to because they are called "Christian." And as a result we cannot put our hearts into what we say about these things, and the critics of Christianity see that we cannot. If we could believe these things with the fervor our fathers felt for them we could still make them living for the world. But, for better or worse, that power is gone from us.