true, of such there may have been; symptoms, too, may have in a measure manifested themselves, but they were so vague and faint that they passed us by well-nigh unheeded; until a Voice from the heights of its own clear vision, and with the weight of its infallible authority, was raised to warn us and to arouse us, to teach us and to tell us that the most prominent of the adversaries of the Church to-day, are to be found in her own bosom. The revelation was assuredly startling to the most of us, but it was a revelation fully substantiated by the solemn words of our Holy Father Pius X., in his latest Encyclical on "Modernism."

Brethren, what do you, as intelligent and, at least, as ordinarily instructed Catholics, think of a system which holds that the proof that there is a God at all, resolves itself in its last analysis into a mere sentiment of the soul; that God's communication with his creatures was not made in the sense or the way in which you have been taught to believe it was made; that the Sacred Scriptures are but a collection of human experiences that may have happened in any religion? A system which holds that our Lord was limited in his knowledge, that perhaps there was a time when he was not conscious of his own Divine mission; a system thus destructive, as the Holy Father says, of his Divine personality? A system which holds that the Church is but the product of the collective consciences of her members, to which collective conscience, her teaching authority, her sacraments, her liturgy, and her whole action must be subject? A system which holds that religious truth may vary; so that what seems to be true at one time, may cease to be so at another; that thus dogma and doctrine may convey very different meanings to the passing generations of progressive mankind?

Ponder, brethren, for an instant, if you will, upon the import of that teaching. Consider the philosophy of it, its theology. Would he who is the Supreme Head of the Church, would he be true to himself or to his sacred trust, if he did not rise up and in words, aye, of blasting force, repudiate, reprobate, and condemn it? Would he who is the Watchman supreme on the towers of Israel, placed there to guard the citadel of truth, placed there to guard the deposit of faith, would he be mindful of his high office, did he not unmask the foes from within as well as without, expose their designs and put upon them the mark of their treachery and their guile? Would he, in fine, to

whom were said-in the person of the first occupant of that office, the successor in that apostolic princedom-the words: "I give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven"; the words: "Feed my lambs and feed my sheep"; the words: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you so that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not, and thou once being converted, confirm thy brethren "; would he not have proved himself a recreant and unfaithful servant if he could forget them, in the hour of need or of peril, for the charge committed to his care? Ah, brethren, he did not forget them, as none from Peter to Pius forgot them, and as the history of Christendom for nineteen hundred years proclaims on its every page. For, go through that history as cursorily as you will, and then say what is the one simple, predominating fact from which you never can get away in the lives of the holders of the papacy. Is it not simply and purely the conciousness of the right which these words of our Divine Lord imparted, and of the duty which they imposed, and the consequent exercise of that right and that duty in every crisis. and in every emergency that called for such exercise on their part? Why, brethren, what else after all in one sense does the history of the Church resolve itself into but the history of the aims and the efforts, the trials and the sufferings, and the sacrifices of Christ's Vicars on earth to ward off heresy and error, to check their insidious advance, to repair their ravages, and to preserve intact and undefiled the "faith once delivered to the saints." For this end they felt they were in this world—but not of it.

For it, and to attain it, they withstood Roman power in the heyday of its might and its splendor, and Grecian subtlety in the very acme of its polish and its refinement, Oriental despotism in its crudest forms, and Western barbarism in the fiercest floods of its most savage fury. For it, and to attain it, they opposed the ambitions of kings and potentates, and the lust and passions of the great and the powerful; the sanguinary outbursts of lawless multitudes, as well as the vain and noxious output of proud, arrogant, misguided human reason. For it, and to attain it, their guiding hand and stimulating, but corrective, impulse were upon schools and scholars, whether of olden Antioch and Athens, Alexandria and Constantinople, mediæval Paris and Oxford, as well as the Louvain and Wash

ington of to-day. For it, in fine, they bore slander and misrepresentation, persecution and hatred, and stripes and chains, and exile and death. And why? Because they could not do otherwise; because the injunction of the Master pressed ever upon them; because the interests of his kingdom they must at every cost conserve.

Again, brethren, in doing so, from another point of view, they were only measuring up to the full responsibilities of the position in which he himself had placed them. If it was part of our Lord's plan for the salvation of the souls of men, to found a spiritual kingdom-and his words bear no other interpretation-and if the headship of that kingdom was to be in himself and its earthly headship in the Apostle of his choice; and if that kingdom was to be visible, permanent, doing and continuing at all times his work in the world, it surely would be only in accord with the truth and the infallibility of the divine promise, that there should exist, in the presence of men, visible to the gaze of the world, an institution of this character, and thus we should be prepared also to witness in the action of his earthly vicars, whenever and wherever the purity and integrity of the faith, which is the very life of the Church, were touched or jeopardized, only what the princes of this world would do for their own in like circumstances and under like conditions. And as kings and princes would not then hesitate to put forth the whole force of their power and their sovereignty, to employ every lawful means at their disposal, in order to shield their people and their country, so must the Chief of God's Church maintain, without impairment, the spiritual inheritance placed within his keeping and safeguard the weal of the flock entrusted to his care. For him to do otherwise, to be possible even otherwise, would be a falsification of the history of the past, nay, a falsification of the divine promise itself.

Modernism, brethren, is the latest newcomer to strut into the arena and to challenge the gaze and attention of the world, not as a foe, but under the guise of a friend; not, as it claims, to attack, but to reform the Church-a reformation, however, which, the Holy Father says, is death. Carried away by the spirit of novelty of the age, dazzled not only by the vaunted triumphs of science in the realms of sense, but also in regions which are beyond its sphere, possessed to the full with an uncontrollable desire to pursue dangerous intellectual pathways,

and brooking no restraint in its intellectual methods, gifted with a certain scholarship and learning peculiar to itself, Modernism seeks not only to break with the past, but to heap contumely upon it; not only to disregard the Fathers and the Doctors and the Apostolical traditions of antiquity, but to exclude them from any share in its plan for a new interpretation of the Scriptures; for a reconstruction of theology and philosophy, which shall, above all, exclude the Angelic Doctor and his school from their domain; for a reconstruction and reformation of the Church herself which shall make her harmonize her policy and her institutions with the widest and deepest results of scientific inquiry; and, in a word, with every aspiration of humanity.

Modernism, will it last? Who can tell? But one thing is certain, one thing is clear: It can no longer hide itself beneath the broad mantle of the Church; no longer be free to work its poisonous way, not only into the branches and shoots, as the Holy Father says, but into the very trunk of the tree of faith, and into the heart of the Church; but now, being "cast out into exterior darkness," it will be left to find its place among and to share the fate of the other heresies, the other errors, and the other aberrations of human reason, which have so often vexed the course of the bark of Peter down the stream of time.

Brethren, with grateful, loyal hearts, then, will we acclaim the act which has wrought this blissful consummation, and, with joyous obedience, accept it. With renewed devotion will we rally around him whose act it was, and in his voice recognize the voice of him who once said to the tempest and the storm: "Peace, be still." Thus will it ever be, as it has ever been. Thus will it ever be, that our vision will be brightened and our hope gladdened, our courage uplifted and our very life pulsate with the throbbings of a new life within us, as we behold that olden bark ploughing her way triumphantly through the tumultuous seas that would engulf her; ploughing her way triumphantly through the angry waves and the winds that madly beat against her; through the shipwrecks of philosophies and the shattered hulks of the empires and monarchies now strewn along the shores of time; ever bearing with her and within her, the souls of the redeemed, the souls of the redeemed of Christ, and bearing them, aye, up to the eternal mountains that stand forever around the heavenly Jerusalem.

THE ERRORS CONDEMNED.

BY THOMAS F. BURKE, C.S.P.

T is our duty to-day, in this one of a course of sermons on the latest Encyclical of our Supreme Pontiff, to bring to your attention the principal fallacies that are there laid bare. The main part of the Encyclical is doctrinal in character. It expounds, and then condemns, not one but many errors which had found defenders in certain circles within the Church at the present time. To this set of errors has been given the title "Modernism." If we consider the basic principles upon which these fallacies are constructed, if we bear in mind that these principles are agnostic and pantheistic in tendency, we may rightly say that Modernism is not new but rather ancient, older even than Christianity itself. But if we consider the principles of Modernism in their application to the facts and dogmas upon which Catholic faith rests and to the nature of that faith itself, if we bear in mind that these principles form the basis of a system that disregards the sacred traditions of Christian teaching, then it is indeed a new heresy or rather a new "combination of heresies."

Modernism attacks the very foundations of belief. Apart from any philosophical considerations, the Catholic rests his faith, his acceptance of the Christian religion, upon certain real things, objective facts and truths concerning God. That God exists; that God has given a revelation to man; that God sent his only-begotten Son upon earth; that this Son is Jesus Christ both God and man; that he founded a Church, to the care of which he committed his teachings and his commands, and that these teachings and commands have been safeguarded and given to men of all times by that Church; these are the preliminaries of the Catholic's act of faith. They are based upon the conclusions of reason and the testimony of history, and without them man can have no certainty as to his religious obligations.

In other words, whatever the spiritual life of any individual