the more mitigated types; and we cheerfully bear testimony to the illuminating fact that American Episcopalians, in common with their religious kinsfolk across the sea, have not a few of these inscrutable achievements to show to their spiritual credit. Our contention is, however, that they are not entirely convincing from the surer Catholic standpoint; and they certainly are too rare in number to affect the sinister significance of the more worldly changes of creed to which we referred above.

And so our original assertion that Protestantism has, on the whole, tended, and instinctively tended, to obscure the sacramental idea by its too absorbing pre-occupation with the actualities of this life, whether in the guise of fashion or philosophy, would seem to be above intelligible debate. By flinging aside the ancient Catholic tradition of a divinely instituted and sevenfold source of grace, producing its separate and distinct results at every turn and crisis of the Christian life by an instrumental, and ex-opere-operato kind of causality, it prepared the way for that quasi-naturalistic attitude of soul in the presence of the Gospel mysteries, which seems to have become a specific note or property of its general belief. Whether it was really driven to take up this radical position by the sheer momentum, so to call it, of its earlier protest against certain pre-tridentine misconceptions that no Catholic scholar would wish to defend today, or whether its present bias must be set down to some deeper psychological defect, such as its ill-tempered rejection of the principle of obedience to spiritual authority which, up to the Reformation period, had been recognized as part of the very substance and fibre of faith, and a necessary ingredient of the soul's habitual loyalty to Christ, is of little consequence now. The step was taken. The profound mysteriousness of the sac. ramental idea was reduced to a mere question of evangelical rites, beautifully symbolic, it is true, but reminiscential, rather than operative or life-giving, and making little or no appeal to the will in its after-encounters with temptation. So many sure ways of health and strength were thus sealed up for future generations that were never to be permitted to hear of them save as dangerous deceits; superstitions of which a spiritual Christianity was well rid.

The process, extending through at least three centuries, by which so stupendous a change in the psychology of Christendom was finally effected, becomes all the more instructive to

the present-day believer in the religion of the New Testament, when it is studied in connection with another change to which it seems to be related both in its subtler causes and in its more remote effects. In the eyes of the hereditary Catholic it was a slow draining of the springs of grace and character; a phenomenon entirely without parallel in the previous history of religious dissidence. Earlier anti-sacramental movements, like English Lollardism, for instance, had flourished here and there for a while and then died. But the outlook was graver now. For, in spite of Luther's somewhat inconsistent attacks upon Heussgen and the Zwinglian party, in spite, too, of the not less conservative, but equally illogical, instincts at work among a section of the English reformers, as revealed in the studied vaguenesses of the Thirty-Nine Articles, here was a novelty that gave promise of a many-sided but perverted life.

It needs little historic insight to enable the present-day student of religious phenomena to point out how various and yet how fatal that first rejection of the fuller Catholic idea was to prove in the course of the centuries. The slow, draining process whereof we have spoken above was accompanied by another and more terrible emptying-out; a kenosis, one might fairly call it, which no optimism of Neo-Kantian faith will enable the candid and plain-minded observer to view with any feeling short of dismay. We speak, of course, of that strange, increasingly cold and challenging attitude of criticism towards the Christ of the Gospels which is maintained by a distinguished body of University scholars throughout Teutonic Europe to-day, and which bids fair to make its influence felt not less disastrously in English-speaking lands also. Under a speciously scientific plea (which we hope to show is only a pseudo-scientific plea at best) of helping the religious student to disengage the historic from the legendary Christ, and setting him before one in his habit as he lived, the Gospel narrative is subjected to a piece-meal process of rejection and emendation that common sense would cry out against in the case of the least authentic biography known to readers of classical literature. The results obtained by this method are many and curious.

Yet, in spite of grave contradictions in detail, as in the problem of our Lord's Messianic consciousness, for instance, there is a remarkable consensus of discovery on one vital point. The Jesus of history can no longer be accepted as the Jesus of the

Four Gospels of Catholicism. Faith may still account him divine in some sense that philosophy may justify; but science reduces him to a pathetically human, if yet solitary and unique, figure. This is the Jesus of Schmiedel, of Van Manen, of Bousset, of the two Holtzmanns-the shadowy Personality lurking behind the theories of Jülicher, of Wrede, of Baron von Soden. And the essays and studies put forth with such indefatigable iteration by the several less widely known, but not less widely learned Privat-docenten in the various universities of Germany and Holland, are further illustrations of the kind of Christ that history, reconstructed along such new lines, will hereafter afford.

And what a scientifically inadequate Christ it is to have inspired such a movement as culminated, we will not say in Catholicism, but in the Christianity of the Acts and the enthusiasms of the various Pauline communities. It is not so far a cry to the discredited Strauss of the earlier nineteenth century; yet surely the thing of shreds and patches that he gave us is a more intelligible figure than this pale ghost of the Neo-Teutonic Gospel! It can hardly be said that we have as yet seen the end of the movement. Conjecture follows upon conjecture and theory upon theory with most widely divergent results; and all the while the exoteric lay intellect is assured that it is being fed upon a fortifying diet of facts-essential facts; by which is meant, it would seem, the author's temperamental transcript of them.

And it is thought that the faith once delivered sacramentally to the saints-Lutheran or Catholic or Dutch Reformed can hardly matter in such a scientific contingency now-will be renewed by such inverted Gnosticism. The pedantry of specialism might conceivably go further; but it could hardly move with more stupefying results. For not the least significant thing about this portentous outburst of religious intellectualism is the apparent sincerity of it all. What is more significant still, is the readiness of Scotch Presbyterians and Broad Church Anglicans to accept it at its own valuation, and retail it in turn, either in popular epitomes, or in translations for a supposedly pietistic, but always very Protestant, world.

We have been at some pains to describe at length this curious saturnalia of the German university intellect, because its present excesses will help the discerning reader to grasp the point of our suggestion, that Protestantism lost more than its leaders realized, when it deliberately sealed up the ancient

paths to an ordered mysticism, by rejecting the Catholic idea of the sacraments, endeavoring thenceforth to feed its hunger for an always indwelling Lord by philosophic pietism, supplemented by unrestrained speculation on an always outdwelling or historic Christ.

The present welter can only redound in the long event to the true glory of the unchanging Catholic cause. It enables one to see that even facts need to be arranged with some sense of their proportions before they can be made to convey a message to the soul. The Catholic Church is no more afraid of facts than it is of mysteries, natural or supernatural. As a living institution she is compact of both, and has categories for a true interpretation of both, just in so far as religious human nature-which is not quite the same thing as scholastic human nature-needs to have them expounded. In spite of the poignant misunderstandings, the confusions and hesitations pathetically incident to her secular career, we think it no exaggeration to say that the more comprehensive verdict of history will, on the whole, bear out that contention. For what, after all, is history, even in its most pitiless and scandalously scientific form, but a gradual manifestation of the designs of God in Christ?

Framework that waits for a picture to frame!

It is to the same verdict of history that we have appealed in the assertion, made frankly in the earlier pages of this article, that the religious reformers of the sixteenth century made a lamentable mistake when they broke with the old Catholic notion of a sacramental system of grace. For it is to that initial error, more appreciably than to anything else, that their hereditary hardness of temper to the principle of authority in religion and their gradual estrangement from the fuller and Catholic Christ of the Gospels, as the source of that authority, is ultimately due. They departed from the obediences by which man's ineradicable instinct for mysticism was, in the designs of God, to be kept healthy and alive. What wonder, therefore, that, being starved of such authentic helps to true inwardness of vision, the divine lineaments of the Christ of the Gospels should have become, in spite of all their questioning, somewhat unscientifically blurred?

Seton Hall, South Orange, N. J.

THE ENCYCLICAL ON MODERNISM.

THE following article is the first of the Advent (1907) course of sermons delivered in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, at the instance of his Grace, the Most Reverend Archbishop. The object of the course was to explain the content and application of the Encyclical on "Modernism." The second sermon of the course follows in this number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. The others will be published in the February number.-EDITOR C. W.

THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF.

"I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE."

BY JOSEPH F. MOONEY, V.G.

The

O one, brethren, I think, will deny that the Church in our day is undergoing a severe ordeal. assertion holds true if the term Christianity be taken even in a loose sense. But it holds still more true, and you can well bear witness to the

fact, if Christianity be understood as identical with the religion which you and I profess and with the Church to which you and I belong. It may indeed be a question whether that ordeal is severer than at any other time in the history of the past, but this much is at least certain: it has now some features that are distinctly its own, and that do not lessen its pain and its bitterness for those of the household of the faith. Heretofore, as now, the Church has had her open and avowed enemies, those who made no concealment of their purpose, and who, with motives as varied as the range of human passion could suggest, and with weapons as deadly as human ingenuity could devise, sought to encompass the Church's failure and the Church's ruin.

No great amount of knowledge is required to tell us this, and, as a consequence, our deepest sympathies went out, and are still going out in abundant flow, to the tried and harassed mother of us all. Realizing, then, the greatness and the soreness of her present afflictions, it was hard indeed for us, who live in this favored land of ours, to imagine whence new ones could arise, new dangers come, or new perils threaten. Rumors, it is