We have all known, though doubtless our fathers knew him better, that studious theologian who, as proof of a devout life’s industry, left behind him a Testament worn to something like its elemental dust. He was a realist in temperament, and sought God and God’s meaning in documents as an historian might seek to reconstruct some character of the past from the archives. He was supplemented in his labors by learned indefatigable searchers of other remains of the past from whose ruins they sought to bring corroborative testimony. He was opposed only by other students who had pored over their Testaments with equal devotion, if to opposite purpose, and by other archaeologists who had searched the ruins with equal pains, if with other result. But protagonist and antagonist alike of the Christianity into which we were born were realists. Neither dreamt that the existence or non-existence, the benevolence or cruelty, the oneness or manyness of God were matters with which his personal wishes and strivings, his finite wantings and not wantings could have anything to do. If you had suggested to either that perhaps God was still in the making and that those who would know Him must strain their eyes toward the future, not keep them fixed on the past--it is a question which would have been first to put you down as an impious fellow and a blasphemer. How different from all this is the spirit of that recent movement within the Christian church that is generally called Modernism! “Defined and condemned in the encyclical _Pascendi_,” writes J. Bourdeau, in 1907, “modernism continues to fill the reviews and the periodicals, even those that ordinarily treat of matters profane. This internal crisis of Catholicism, this new attempt to reconcile the church with the times, aimed at internal reform, not at schism. It was destined to end in the excommunication or interdiction of some of its more refractory spirits and in the submission of almost all. And yet, by those who shared its hopes, modernism is not looked upon as the bed of a torrent from now on to be dry; it runs like an underground river, and some day, perhaps, will come to the surface again with sufficient force to sweep away the dikes.” Well, this modernism which M. Bourdeau, in his little volume, “Pragmatisme et Modernisme,” brackets with pragmatism as being of the same temper, is, like all other modernities, not very new. We associate it with such names as Father Tyrrel, in England; l’Abbé Loisy, in France; the senator and novelist Fogazzaro, in Italy, and if the matter has interested us, with a host of other writers no less distinguished. But it is really of the essence of Newman, and goes back to Pascal. For “The heart,” Pascal has said, “has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” It was to these reasons that Newman listened, and offers us again in his “Grammar of Assent,” and it is these reasons that modernism would have to be the only ones on which Christianity can be safely founded.