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ARTHUK GALTON^ M.A.^ ON 



average, both in intelligence and virility. The papacy is tend- 

 ing inevitably to destroy ronian Catholicism. That is why 

 separation is not dangerous to the State in France, as many 

 liberals imagined. It would have been exceedingly dangerous 

 if the papacy had its old influence ; if it could coerce govern- 

 ments and manipulate voters. But the pontificate of Pius X. 

 has revealed that it cannot. And so long as education is 

 diffused and efficient, the papacy and the clergy will not regain 

 those powers. On one side, we have an educated and a progres- 

 sive democracy; on the other, an over-centralised, and therefore 

 a weakened, hierarchy, an under- educated parochial cleroy, 

 and a horde of quite uneducated and obscurantist religious 

 orders. These are the elements with which France has to deal. 

 As long as these qualities on both sides are maintained, or still 

 more as they are developed, the breach between the church and 

 the nation must grow wider. After all, in spite of many 

 superficial appearances, the papal church even at present is not 

 a very solid building. It has a pretentious facade, with nothing 

 much behind it. It has an imposing hierarchy, but not much 

 popular support ; while the hierarchy itself is crushed by the 

 papacy, and undermined by the religious orders ; and the 

 priesthood is becoming always more negligible intellectually. 

 No system can endure permanently under these conditions. It 

 may long be powerful for mischief, since it is built on traditional 

 ignorance, and trades on atavistic fears ; but the papacy cannot 

 dominate a world which it is no longer capable of leading. All 

 the newer forces which are influencing mankind are against it ; 

 and no religious organisation can subsist in the face of a truth 

 and a morality which are higher than its own. 



Even within the church, these forces, which seemed dormant 

 for so long, are now becoming visible and audible. The papal 

 church may have appeared stagnant since 1870, but it was 

 really germinating with new life. This life is described by the 

 insufficient and misleading term of modernism. It is a thing 

 easy to understand, but much less easy to define, as even the 

 Pope has found. Modernism is not, as the Pope has asserted, a 

 system of philosophy or a school of thought, with fixed aims 

 and exclusive rules ; it means being in touch and sympathy 

 with the intellectual world of to-day, with this age in which 

 we live. It implies knowing the best that has been thought 

 and said in the gieat world of the past ; handling and judging 

 this knowledge by our present scientific methods, and applying 

 it to the iiighest purposes. Some modernists are philosophers, 

 some are theologians, some philologists, some anthropologists 



