MODERNISM AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY. 



63 



view defective. " Personally," he says {Life, ii, p. 209), " I do 

 not think his [Newman's] effort to unite the conception of 

 development with the Catholic conception of tradition was 

 successful or coherent . . . with his acceptance of the Roman 

 Catholic idea of the Depositum Fidei, as being a divinely com- 

 municated ' Credo,' or theological summary — no synthesis with 

 evolutionary philosophy was possible. I have only gradually 

 come to realize this : so that I was formerly more of a New- 

 manite than I am now." And yet he felt bound to add, " It 

 was the fiction of an unchanged and unchangeable nucleus of 

 sacred tradition that saved the Christianity of the Apostles 

 from being quickly transformed out of all recognition" {Life, 

 ii,p. 218). 



All hope of a reformation by the application of development 

 gradually died in him. Liberal Catholicism demanded not a 

 reformation, but a revolution. Like Christianity on Judaism, 

 Liberal Catholicism would have to be a graft on and not a 

 growth from the existing Church {ibid., p. 289). The deposit of 

 the Faith was like the Ptolemaic astronomy, Tyrrell contended ; 

 it could not be developed into the Copernican. 



He seems at length to have taken refuge in a kind of Mysticism 

 divorced from dogma, and to have trusted to Pragmatism to 

 propagate it. " Such is the truth of religion, namely," he says, 

 " its utility for eternal life, i.e., for the life of correspondence 

 with the Absolute " {ibid., p. 178). 



" From the continual and endless variations of belief and 

 devotion which originate in one way or other, the Spirit of 

 holiness eventually selects and assimilates the good and useful, 

 and throws away the worthless or mischievous by the slow logic 

 of spiritual life and experience " {ibid., p. 180). 



Tyrrell and Pragmatism. 



Here we come face to face with Pragmatism pure and simple : 

 the non-survival of the unfit. What is Pragmatism ? In the 

 Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, Mr. C. S. Pierce 

 invented the name to designate a rough-and-ready test of the 

 truth or " value " of anything. His friend, Professor Wm. James, 

 took up the name and developed Pierce's views, thus giving a 

 wide currency to them. Pragmatism is practically an attempted 

 answer to Pilate's scoffing question, " What is truth ? " Intel- 

 lectualism, according to Professor James, could not sive a 

 satisfactory answer, and yet an accessible solution of the 

 question was continuously needed. 



