66 



THE "REV. CANON E. MCCLURE, M.A., M.R.I. A., ON 



bridge could be thrown across it, and no resource was left to 

 the Roman authorities but to condemn Modernism, root and 

 branch. 



The Encyclical Pascexdi. 



The Papal Encyclical (Pascendi) condemning " Modernism " 

 is a closely reasoned document. According to it the basis of 

 Modernism is the philosophy of Kant which limits human 

 knowledge to phenomena, and excludes the absolute from our 

 cognition. The centre and sum of the Kantian philosophy 

 is comprised in the following statement : " We can know only 

 phenomena, not things in themselves, that is, Nature inde- 

 pendent of an observer. For our knowledge must be in part 

 determined by the constitution of our cognitive faculties, and 

 w r e can never know what things are out of relation to those 

 faculties." 



This view, according to the Encyclical, excludes natural 

 theology, which attempts to deduce the existence and source of 

 the attributes of God from external evidence. God cannot be 

 reached, the Modernists contend, by any reasoning process, but 

 only in what they call " vital immanence," which is to be sought 

 for in human experience, that is to say, in a pervasive feeling 

 of need of the Divine, which implies the existence of its object. 



This feeling;, according- to the Modernists, takes its rise in 

 the subconscious self, from which it emerges into actual con- 

 sciousness only when circumstances bring the Unknowable 

 impressively before the mind. It is in this " vital immanence," 

 the Modernists assert, and not in anything external, that 

 Revelation takes place. If this revelation is associated with any 

 phenomena of nature, or with human personality, it can only, 

 the Modernist says, be so at the expense of distorting it, and 

 hence arises the necessity of the historian and critic to restore 

 it to its true character. This process constitutes the foundation 

 of historical criticism. The Person of Christ, for instance, has 

 been thus distorted from the real form in which It appeared on 

 earth, by ascribing to It miraculous powers, but science and 

 historical criticism, the Modernists contend, show that there 

 cannot have been anything in the historical Christ which was 

 not purely human. " Whatever, therefore," says the Encyclical, 

 " savours of the Divine must, according to the Modernists, be 

 ' eliminated from His history.' " 



All religion, continues the Encyclical's exposition of 

 Modernism, " is only a development of this religious sentiment 



