We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction.  In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M. Loisy has surrendered.  We believe that the Kingdom of God which Christ preached was something much more than a platonic dream.  We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man.  We believe, in short, that the object of our worship was a historical figure.

I will give a few extracts from Speculum Animae, a most valuable and most beautiful little book, which show the true bent of his mind: 

     On all questions about religion there is the most distressing
     divergency.  But the saints do not contradict each other.

Prayer . . . is “the elevation of the mind and heart to God.”  It is in prayer, using the word in this extended sense, that we come into immediate contact with the things that cannot be shaken.

Are we to set against such plain testimony the pessimistic agnosticism of a voluptuary like Omar Khayyam?

     There was the Door to which I found no Key. . . .

May it not be that the door has no key because it has no lock?

The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed.

The life of Christ was throughout a life of prayer.  Not only did He love to spend many hours in lonely communing with His Father, on the mountain-tops, which He was perhaps the first to love, and to choose for this purpose, but His whole life was spent in habitual realisation of God’s presence.

Religion is caught rather than taught; it is the religious teacher, not the religious lesson, that helps the pupil to believe.

What we love, that we see; and what we see, that we are.

We need above all things to simplify our religion and our inner life generally.

We want to separate the essential from the nonessential, to concentrate our faith upon the pure God-consciousness, the eternal world which to Christ was so much nearer and more real than the world of external objects.

Christ meant us to be happy, happier than any other people.

It is because he is so profoundly convinced of the mystical truth of Christianity, because he has so honestly tried and so richly experienced that truth as a philosophy of life, it is because of this, and not out of a lack of sympathy with the sad and sorrowful, that he opposes himself to the obscurantism of the Anglo-Catholic and the emotional economics of the political reformer.

“The Christian cure,” he says, “is the only real cure.”  The socialist is talking in terms of the old currency, the currency of the world’s quantitative standards; but Christ introduced a new currency, which demonetises the old.  Spiritual goods are unlimited in amount; they are increased by being shared; and we rob nobody by taking them.  He believes with Creighton that “Socialism will only be possible when we are all perfect, and then it will not be needed.”