How is it that he has come to such a pass?

I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence.  Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first movements.

The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the Christian religion either “the credibility of Judges or the edibility of Jonah,” the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland.  What does it mean?  Is it possible to understand such a perversion of mind?

His intellectual position, as he states it, is a simple one—­for the present.

He asks us, Is Truth something which we are ordered to keep, or something which we are ordered to find?

Is our business holding the fort?  Or is it looking for the Pole?

The traditionalist can say, “Here is the Truth, written down for you and me in black and white; I mean to keep it, and defend it from attack; will you rally round it?  Will you help me?”

He shows you the modernist wandering in the wilderness of speculative theology looking for the Truth which the traditionalist, safe, warm, and secure of eternal life, keeps whole and undefiled in his fortress.

It is like a fairy tale.

How simple it sounds!  But when Father Knox looks in the glass does he not see its staring fallacy?

Did he keep the Truth of his boyhood—­the Truth of his father’s church?  Did he not go outside the fortress of Evangelicalism and seek for Truth in the fortress of Anglo-Catholicism?  And here again, did he not break faith, and once more seek Truth outside its walls?  If Truth is not something to be found, how is it that he is not still in the house of his fathers?

Does he fail to see that this argument not merely explains but vindicates the rejection of Christ by the Jews?  They had their tradition, a tradition of immemorial sanctity, perhaps the noblest tradition of any people in the world.

Does he not also see that it destroys the raison d’etre of the Christian missionary, and would reduce the whole world to a state of what Nietzsche called Chinaism and profound mediocrity?

Every religion in history, from the worship of Osiris, Serapis, and Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the loyalty of its disciples.  What logic, what magic of holiness, could destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation of the devil?

The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is “to resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is told, just as he is expected to do what he is told, not what comes natural to him.”