But what are they, these reasons, and what does this voice of the heart say? Its first clear utterance is negative. It does not care who wrote the various books of the Scriptures, or what corroborative or contradictory evidence those who study the documents and monuments of the past may come upon. “Higher critics,” so far from being its enemies, are welcome participants in its cause. As little does it cling to the literal sense of the various dogmatic interpretations the Church has from time to time put upon the sacred writings. Would you know, for example, whether there is a Real Presence? Modernism would answer: The Eucharist is indeed meaningless unless there be a Real Presence; but whether Christ is really there for you or not depends on you alone. And the like of other dogmas. Yet it would appear that history, sacred, ecclesiastical, or profane, is no dead letter to the modernist. He is intensely conscious and amply studious of the past. Nor will he, if I make him out, permit its episodes to be treated as symbols, parables and allegories. No, the past tells the story of a great religious truth in the making. If you ask him what Christianity is, he will tell you it isn’t, it never has been, it never will be any definitely finished thing; but for him it is the best guide to living that he with all his devotion and all his thought can make it. The modernists are Christians because they are heirs to, and imbued with the spirit of Christianity, as they are not inspired of the Buddha or of Confucius. Yes, they are devout Catholics because they can work better at the making of a religion in the atmosphere of their ancestral church than in any other air. Religion to them is to aid in the way best suited to their temperaments and traditions in the evolution of religion; for them Christianity is in process, and we are the potters that mould it, not the explorers that discover it.