could not become those of the world, but they could
remain in it as a leaven and an ideal. As such
they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in
the Catholic church. The modernists talk a great
deal of development, and they do not see that what
they detest in the church is a perfect development
of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series
of ages they give out the full and exact note of the
New Testament. Much has been added, but nothing
has been lost. Development (though those who talk
most of it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux
and dissolution. It is not a continuity through
changes of any sort, but the evolution of something
latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
instruments of defence for the same original life.
In this sense there was an immense development of
Christianity during the first three centuries, and
this development has continued, more slowly, ever
since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern
churches have refused themselves all new expressions,
while the Protestant churches have eaten more and
more into the core. It is a striking proof of
the preservative power of readjustment that the Roman
church, in the midst of so many external transformations
as it has undergone, still demands the same kind of
faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith
in another world. The mise-en-scene has
changed immensely. The gospel has been encased
in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone
of a saint in a gilded reliquary; but the relic for
once is genuine, and the gospel has been preserved
by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows
a greater resemblance to the apostles in his outer
situation than the pope does; but what mind-healer
or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the natural
world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values,
or the blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the
inferiority of natural human bonds, or a contempt
for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full of
pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this.
It is here, and certainly not among the modernists,
that the gospel is still believed.
Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler religion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that there is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism, that there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think the pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to say for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and reason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in their hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath their dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them already feel it. To