The Abbé Marat of the Theological School at the Sorbonne and Father Gratry of the Ecole Normale were the initiators of this movement, as far back as the Second Empire. “Modernism” was never a school of thought, philosophical or religious, and it showed itself in a freedom and life, a spirit rather than in any formula;. As Sorel’s syndicalism is an application of the Bergsonian and kindred doctrines to the left wings, and issues in a social theory of “action,” so Modernism is an attempt to apply them to the right and issues in a religion founded on action rather than theology. The writings of the Modernists are extensive, but we mention the names of the chief thinkers. There is the noted exegetist Loisy, who was dismissed in 1894 from the Catholic Institute of Paris and now holds the chair of the History of Religions at the College de France. His friend, the Abbé Bourier, maintained the doctrine, “ Where Christ is there is the Church,” with a view to insisting upon the importance of being a Christian rather than a Catholic or a Protestant. The importance of the Catholic thinker, Blondel, both for religion and for philosophy, has already been indicated at an earlier stage in this book. His work inspires most.Modernist thought. Blondel preaches, with great wealth of philosophical and psychological argument, the great Catholic doctrine of the collaboration of God with man and of man with God. Man at one with himself realises his highest aspirations. Divine transcendence and divine immanence in man are reconciled. God and man, in this teaching, are brought together, and the stern realism of every-day life and the idealism of religion unite in a sacramental union. The supreme principle in this union Laberthonnière shows to be Love. He is at pains to make clear, however, that belief in Love as the ultimate reality is no mere sentimentality, no mere assertion of the will-to-believe. For him the intellect must play its part in the religious life and in the expression of faith. No profounder intellectual judgment exists than just the one which asserts “God is Love,” when this statement is properly apprehended and its momentous significance clearly realised. We cannot but lament, with Laberthonnière, the abuse of this proposition and its subsequent loss of both appeal and meaning through a shallow familiarity. The reiteration of great conceptions, which is the method by which the great dogmas have been handed down from generations, tends to blurr their real significance. They become stereotyped and empty of life. It is for this reason that Le Roy in _Dogme et Critique_ (1907) insisted upon the advisability of regarding all dogmas as expressions of practical value in and for action, rather than as intellectual propositions of a purely “religious” or ecclesiastical type, belonging solely to the creeds.