THE PRESENT POSITION OF CATHOLICS IN FRANCE. 189 



and students of comparative religion ; oihers are biblical 

 scholars and orientalists ; others are hellenists, archaeologists, 

 antiquaries, historians ; many are philanthropists and explorers 

 of social questions. Most of them have come to see that the 

 papal claims are dubious, or worse ; that episcopacy is not what 

 it represented itself to be through so many credulous centuries ; 

 that ecclesiastical organisation and theology are both subject to 

 development; that the present state of the papal church is 

 practically unendurable and theoretically indefensible. In 

 these conclusions, the modernists should have the sympathy of 

 all educated people. In trying to reform the church, they are 

 only doing what anglicans took upon themselves to do in the 

 sixteenth century ; and the modernists have come now to many 

 of the conclusions which were reached by our own reformers 

 then. ^Modernism is dissolving the papal claims and the 

 mediaeval theology just as the new learning dissolved them in 

 the sixteenth century, only with more certitude and finality. 



ISTow the Vatican, for its own obvious purposes, has tried to 

 identify modernism exclusively with biblical criticism, in order 

 to divert protestant sympathy from the modernists, and to 

 draw the attention of the British public from its own abominable 

 methods of dealing with them. For the papacy still works by 

 violence, in its traditional Avays. It uses the Index for writings, 

 and the Inquisition for writers. Behind both is a system of 

 spying and of delation. Within both are secret processes, long 

 since condemned and repudiated by all civilised governments : 

 there are trials in which the accused are not heard, and do not 

 even know their accusation ; the accusers are not confronted 

 with their victims, and witnesses are not examined openly, and 

 judgments are given from which there is no appeal. Beyond 

 these injustices, are excommunication, the boycott, professional 

 ruin, and every species of social persecution or domestic 

 pressure ; all aggravated a thousand-fold by the lies, calumnies, 

 and outrages of the clerical press, the vilest instrument of 

 tyranny and spite and slander and falsehood and corruption 

 and blackmail now existing in the world. It is traditional that 

 the papacy should use these methods ; but it is lamentable 

 that English people should be duped by them, and their want 

 of sympathy with those who suffer is culpable. For there is 

 no royal road to learning, and there is no autocratic or despotic 

 way to truth. It has to be reached by labour and hypothesis 

 and experiment, and by much pondering, and often only 

 through many errors and mistakes. These are inevitable in all 

 human research, and they do not matter if the intention be 



