]
At this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him
away, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to
desert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of
inspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not
become one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished
modernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal
to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking
another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand
firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what
you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the
pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and
then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against
the New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in
the Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental
self against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your
conscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the
flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
follow it on all sides in its vital development.
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