we might follow with sympathy his brave attempt, and should certainly never imagine that the author was himself an unbeliever. On the contrary, the stress laid upon the reality of His continual presence would be an emphatic confession of faith in Him. Is the case changed if M. Loisy, instead of constructing an apology, regards himself as constructing a history? We are believers not in a book but in a Person. M. Loisy repeatedly declares himself a believer in our Divine Master; the very fabric of his argument involves this faith; those who condemn him have never dared to condemn him for disbelief in our Lord's Godhead. They have condemned him for nothing else than the method which he has used to maintain his faith, and for his refusal of submission to those who think his method unsatisfactory.1

But while we vindicate M. Loisy from the charge of unbelief, it is just to ourselves to say that we consider his historical method very dangerous. Without claiming to speak with weight on matters of criticism, we may express our conviction that as a critic he is rash and prejudiced. There are very few accepted critics who are so sweeping as he, and very many who regard the Gospel narrative as trustworthy. We protest against the abuse of language which calls no man a critic unless he rejects old conclusions; as if a man could not be a judge unless he is a Jeffreys. We fear that M. Loisy is often led to reject a passage by subjective reasons, because it implies views which he thinks to belong to a later date of development. We are persuaded that a single generation does not allow sufficient space in the midst of pious persons, zealous for the truth, for the development of the peasant whom M. Loisy describes into the Christ of the earliest Gospel and of St. Paul's undoubted Epistles. And

1 We do not, of course, mean that his private opponents have not charged him with unbelief in our Lord's Godhead. It is a frequent charge. A few months ago the Roman Catholic press spread everywhere the report of an interview of M. Loisy with a correspondent of a secularist French newspaper, in which the priest owned himself, at least by silence, to be a Unitarian. It is easy to say that when M. Loisy declares himself a Christian he is lying. On similar grounds it would be easy to say that Bossuet was an atheist.

we are totally at variance with M. Loisy's theory of history, that it is a priori estopped from dealing with any matter which may be considered supernatural. We demur to the use of the term 'scientific' history if it means any more than accurate and candid. History has to deal with facts reported by observation or by testimony, sifting both, but neglecting nothing because it seemed to point to unrecognized law. It was not science but prejudice which led some physicists to scoff at the experiments of Sir William Crookes with Home because they seemed to imply unknown forces. And if an eye-witness, on other grounds credible, had testified that he had seen the Santa Casa borne by angels to Loreto, it would have been the historian's duty to test the evidence, not to neglect the account because it seemed a childish tale. If, as we fear, M. Loisy has made it a canon that nothing ought to be admitted into his history of our Lord beyond that which might be found in another man, we think him arbitrary. But if we imagine that a phonograph recorded the sayings in the Upper Room, or that a camera depicted the empty tomb, we should readily admit that neither machine gave faith but only material which faith could utilize. What we complain of is that M. Loisy has been rash in discarding facts in which faith can live and grow. Soil is not seed, but if soil is excluded there is nothing in which the seed can germinate.1

It will be seen that we are by no means partisans of M. Loisy. We should not have complained of any exercise of discipline which would have made it clear that he was speaking in his own name and not as an accredited mouthpiece of the Church; we should have recognized it as fair that he should be required to renounce his position as a professor in a Catholic university, and that he should be debarred from the pulpit; and we lament that the practical insistence on the imprimatur should have made it almost impossible for a man to publish his views on his own responsibility without implying the approval of his superiors.

Those who do not care to study M. Loisy's works will find them carefully described, though with a partiality which we do not share, in Mr. A. L. Lilley's Modernism. (London: Pitman, 1908.)

The present writer happened to be in Rome at the time when the Archbishop of Paris was pressing for the endorsement by the Pope of his own censure against M. Loisy. It is not easy to learn the truth in Rome; but there was probability in favour of the rumour that a learned French prelate interposed, and that Leo, unwilling to formulate a theory of inspiration which the Church had never defined, created the Commission on Biblical Studies in the hope of deferring a difficult question. It cannot for a moment be supposed that either prelate or Pope had any doubt of the sincerity of M. Loisy's profession of the Catholic faith. Had they doubted it, they would have been untrue to their duty if they delayed to expel him. Of subsequent details a summary will here suffice. His French opponents found support in Pius, which they had sought in vain from Leo. He was censured, but he could not ascertain for what particular doctrines he was censured; for the Vatican holds it an error to maintain that 'to condemn and proscribe a work without the knowledge of the author, without hearing his explanations, without discussion, is something approaching to tyranny' (Librum quemlibet, auctore inscio, notare ac proscribere nulla explicatione admissa, nulla disceptione, tyrannidi profecto est proximum).'

M. Loisy was ready to admit the probability of errors in his works, to withdraw them from circulation, to resign the post of an official teacher; but nothing less than an unconditional retractation was sufficient, and this he could not make. On March 7, 1908, the greater excommunication was launched against him, declaring him vitandum atque ab omnibus vitari debere. To those who are familiar with the religious temper of the French people, it is some comfort to be assured that the latter part of the sentence is not to be rigidly enforced; he will live and die without the Sacraments; but perhaps the scruples of tradesmen and landlords will not deprive him of a roof or a crust, and it is even conceivable that a physician will tend his sickness.

We turn our attention to another priest who is ranked

1 1 Encyclical, Pascendi.

with M. Loisy as a leader of the Modernists, and shares, though in a milder form, his excommunication.1

Mr. George Tyrrell was born, we believe, in Ireland, about the year 1862, so that his boyhood coincided with the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, in which he was reared, and the outburst of bellicose Protestantism which followed it. He 'took as little interest in religious questions as any other healthy-minded schoolboy' until, at the age of fifteen, a crude perusal of Bishop Butler roused in him a dim sense of there being a great and pressing world-problem' to be solved for him and for others. If for others, it must be approached not in isolation but in company; and the Roman Church attracted him as the nearest approach to a Christian Society which he had discovered. Of social Christian life the Irish Church at the time could teach him little; and it is not surprising that at the age of nineteen he entered the Roman Church, and the following year he joined the Society of Jesus. We know few details of the subsequent years, but hardly think ourselves mistaken in the impression that, before the close of the last century, he was one of the able men who belonged to the Metaphysical Society, and was in correspondence with Henry Sidgwick. His books were among the few by English Roman Catholics which attracted many readers outside his own Communion.

The work which brought him into notoriety was that reprinted as A Much Abused Letter. A professor of anthropology in an Italian university, who had been conspicuous as a fervent Catholic, found himself forced by his studies into a position which, he feared, was inconsistent with the profession of the Christian creed. But he continued a devout admirer of our Lord; he still desired the Sacraments, and he could not find refuge in any of the Italian Protestant Churches. Could he with his present views honestly continue to frequent the altar? He sought advice from several priests,

1 We learn the facts of Father Tyrrell's life mainly from his own books: A Much Abused Letter (1906), and Medievalism (1908). The course of his mental development may be traced, though with scanty help as to dates, in his essays reprinted in Through Scylla and Charybdis (1907). All his works are published by Messrs. Longmans, Green, and Co.

and received contradictory answers; and finally a bishop, too much occupied to consider the case, referred him to Father Tyrrell.

The answer, though long, was a private letter. It passed from hand to hand; it was translated (not very accurately, and without the author's name) into Italian; and finally extracts were printed in a daily newspaper. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the version was erroneously ascribed to Fogazzaro, and is said to have been one of the causes which brought Il Santo to the Index. The letter was written to meet a private case of conscience, and to publish it was like transcribing a physician's prescription, written in view of an exceptional though not very uncommon form of disease, into a manual of domestic medicine.

The General of the Society of Jesus inquired of Father Tyrrell whether he was the author of the passages printed in the newspaper, and of course the author, with some reservations as to mistranslation and careless selection, accepted the full responsibility. We need not go into the details of how the book was condemned, the writer required never to write a letter without submitting it to supervision, how he was expelled from the Society, and how, finally, he was excommunicated. It should be said that Father Tyrrell did not publish the letter until 1906, and then only because it had passed out of his control.

And now let us consider this heretical work which required that the writer should be treated as a heathen man and a publican. But first it may be worth saying that to the saintly Italian priest who gave us the translation we offered in return as a sample of the same spirit, the Theological Essays of F. D. Maurice.

Cases like that of the professor are not uncommon. They are quite different from the case of a man who, though an unbeliever, desires to remain in the communion of the Church for reasons of convenience; for in the present instance that which attracted to the altar was a real reverence for the truth of which the profession had become impossible. Among ourselves the problem is commonly solved by the person himself, though it often happens that