But if the age of
partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
him a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
only in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted
in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a
derivation from it--a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have
wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of
professors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret
of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent
outraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this
unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of
what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is.
Pages:
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69