A writer is free to call the visions and voices of St. Joan illusions, and yet to remain a sound historian in the ordinary acceptation of that term; but if he denies that St. Joan herself and her contemporaries believed she had had such experiences, then he is an absurd historian. It is clear, on reading Mr. Wells’s pages, that he has never come across the historical arguments for regarding belief in the Incarnation as contemporary with Our Lord and His companions. He does not know of their existence. He approaches the problem as though all the world would readily agree with his own cheerfully uninformed conclusions—because he has never heard of any other. He obviously thinks that those who accept as historical Christ’s own gradual revelation of the doctrine, and its acceptation by certain contemporaries, are merely doing so to order. He thinks they have not read even as much (or as little) as he, and have only to be enlightened. He has no idea that a convincing body of evidence exists and has been marshalled by powerful and numerous pens. Let me begin with the common view which Mr. Wells here repeats. It is essentially the view of _Modernists_ of a particular type, to wit, Modernists of the Protestant type, and of the Protestant type which flourishes chiefly in the world to which Mr. Wells himself belongs. It is not of the German sort, still less of the French sort; it is of the sort which you find in the more popular Sunday journals of the London Press. And here we must define what the Modernist is. The Modernist is a man who, having lost his faith in whatever Catholic doctrine he or his may have held, is afraid of facing the consequences of that loss. That is an exact definition. A man is not a Modernist who denies all Catholic doctrine _en bloc_, from the Omnipotence and Personality of God downwards, and accepts the consequences of such a denial. A man is a Modernist when he no longer admits a Catholic doctrine with his intellect and will, but shirks the loss of its benefits. The fear takes two forms. Sometimes (as with Loisy—a very great scholar—during his period of Modernism), it is the fear of corporate surroundings. A man has ceased to believe, but he is afraid of following out the full consequences of his new intellectual attitude because he fears what people may say. More often the fear is an inward fear, very largely unconscious in its working and certainly unintelligent. It is the fear of losing a certain habit of mind to which the man who has lost belief is accustomed, which is only intellectually tenable so long as he believes, but which he blindly clings to when it is no longer intellectually tenable to him because the loss of the moral habit would be so painful. In the Modernist of this type, trying desperately to combine incompatible things, you will find two marks invariably present. First, he is muddle-headed; secondly, he does violence to sane judgment upon testimony.