But, if too much is surrendered on one side, too much is taken back on the other.  The contention that the progress of knowledge has left the traditional beliefs and cultus of Catholics untouched is untenable.  It is not too much to say that the whole edifice of supernaturalistic dualism under which Catholic piety has sheltered itself for fifteen hundred years has fallen in ruins to the ground.  There is still enough superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at Lourdes, and split hailstones at Remiremont.  But that kind of religion is doomed, and will not survive three generations of sound secular education given equally to both sexes.  The craving for signs and wonders—­that broad road which attracts so many converts and wins so rapid a success—­leads religion at last to its destruction, as Christ seems to have warned His own disciples.  Science has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity.  She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor.  She has left us the divine Christ, whatever may be the truth about certain mysterious events in His human life.  But assuredly she has not left us the right to offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and knowledge will not serve.  Man is one, and reality is one; there can no more be two ’orders of reality’ not affecting each other than there can be two faculties in the human mind working independently of each other.  The universe which is interpreted to us by our understanding is not unreal, nor are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk.  It is a divinely ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning.  It is not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M. Le Roy calls ’transhistorical symbols’—­myths in fact—­which do not become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems to suggest.  Faith is not the born storyteller of Modernist theology.  Faith is, on the practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is a progressive initiation, by experiment which ends in experience, into the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner assurance that these three attributes of the divine nature have one source and conduct to one goal.

The Modernists are right in finding the primary principle of faith in the depths of our undivided personality.  They are right in teaching that faith develops and comes into its own only through the activity of the whole man.  They are right in denying the name of faith to correct opinion, which may leave the character untouched.  As Hartley Coleridge says: