iMODERKlSM : ITS ORIGIN AND TENDENCIES. 



131 



I must add a word or two on another form of modernism, 

 which reveals the attitude of the school on the criticism of the 

 Bible. There is not much to detain us in the Abbe Loisy's 

 The Gospel and the Church. It chietly takes the forms of 

 criticism of Professor Harnack's Wcscndes Christciituin. 1, at 

 least, have no controversy with him here. Ahke in his 

 orthodoxy and his heterodoxy I am disposed on the wdiole to 

 agree with him. But he adopts in his criticism methods of 

 a particukir school wdiich appear to me, as to many otliers, 

 open to serious objection. Thus he remarks (pp. 31, 32) that 

 it seems inconceivable that Jesus should have preached at 

 Jerusalem, declaring Himself to be the Messiah, on several 

 occasions, during several {three I) years, without being arrested. 

 He can but have done so once, and paid the forfeit v\-ith His 

 life." This seems to me the irpoyTov -xjrevSo^ of the method of 

 the modern school of criticism. You say that this or tliat 

 statement is "inconceivable," and you fancy yourself thereby 

 to have exposed the inaccuracy of contemporary, or all but 

 contemporary, and, moreover, extremely well informed 

 historians.* Then St. John's Gospel is rejected, not because 

 it conflicts hopelessly witli the contents of the others, but 

 because it gives the esoteric, as the other three Gospels give 

 the exoteric, teaching of Christ : and this, in spite of the 

 overwhelming evidence which has been adduced in favour of 

 the Gospel having been a genuine production of a disciph^ of 

 Christ. Modern criticism carries on its own isolated research 

 mainly on lines altogether subjective, and establishes its 



M. Loisy, it is true, soon goes a good deal farther than he does in his 

 Compel and the Church. In Quelques Lettrcs., pp. 93, 94, he tells us that " on 

 the evening of the Passion the Body of Jesus was taken down from the 

 Cross by the soldiers and thrown into some common grave, w^here 

 nobody could have had the idea of going to look for, and recognizing it 

 after the lapse of a certain time." Note here, as an ilhistration of 

 modern so-called "scientific" methods, that we (1) have a definite 

 kistorical statement made eighteen centuries and a half after the event, 

 without the slightest histoiical evidence on whii^li to rest it ; (2) that 

 Mr. Loisy fiatly contradicts the statements purporting to be made by eye- 

 witnesses, although handed down as contemporary documents for nearly 

 eighteen hundred years in a society/ delinitdi/ organized for that purpose; 

 a,nd (3) that such a , masterly statement of the evidence as that, for 

 instance, in Godet's Etudes Bihliques is absolutely and contemptuously 

 ignored. And that just because the writer personally imagines the 

 ■event of which such strong evidence can be produced to be incredible I 

 I shall believe this sort of criticism to be " scientific " when I find 

 secular historians resorting to such canons of criticism, and not before. 



