There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious, and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation, pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.  But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin, and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion.  Some of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the English church is, by making opportune concessions.  Others were simply aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should remain strong over the masses.  The clergy was not, in any considerable measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators.  Such persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of any sort was most painful to their minds.  They longed rather for a sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost everything.  A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for nationality glorious and holy.  No wonder that their work in nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are scattered to the winds.  The liberalism for the sake of which they were willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent before the tide of socialism rising behind its back.  The Catholicism which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries.  It is fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan society in which they are forced to live.

The question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one, because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it happens to believe.  Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity coincide—­what a miracle!—­with his own Lutheran and Kantian sentiments.  But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by what it seems in its primitive minuteness.  It is quite true, as the modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.  Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less intellectual