In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will
be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
past. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those
concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.
III
THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
The most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.
Henri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract
universal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in
form wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and
mystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of
science and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be
secretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems
to animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies.
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