of his corps commanders on Saturday or Sunday evening-that Slocum, Sedgwick, French and one or two more opposed a battle, while Howard, Wadsworth and Pleasanton decidedly favored it-that the debate was warm and earnest that Meade's judgment was with the minority, but his desire with the majority-that the army consequently lay idle all day Sunday when Lee was crossing the river some six or eight miles off, Meade knowing nothing of it-and that Monday morning they found all gone and clear across.

"Meade's laurels are badly stained;

for my part I yet put most faith in Hooker."

Mr. Chase's disappointment was as great as Lincoln's and he expressed it in letters to his friends in vivid words. He wrote to George Wilkes on July 23d:

"In your general views as to the campaign which resulted in the passage-so glorious to us-of the Potomac by Lee's army I quite concur. When he advanced into Maryland I wrote to several, and said to more, 'God has delivered him into our hands.' And so he had; but Man did not take the gift."

NE key-note runs through many variations of modernism; it is a clear call for the rejuvenation of Roman Catholicism. The modernists, or Neo-Catholics, as they are beginning to call themselves, believe that the Church can harmonize its teachings with the thought of this age. The most ancient Church can survive by becoming the most modern. The living Church is forever young. The modernists remember that scholasticism, which the Vatican now would enforce, was a new theology in its day-a philosophy fitted to its time. But for the hierarchy to bind mediævalism on Christian faith would be to wrap it in a cerement; the modernists would arm it "with the weapons of the time."

To rejuvenate Catholicism-this in one word is the battle cry of the New Catholics. For this cause Fogazzaro's Saint went to Rome. In this hope a group of Italian priests-scholars, historians, young men wrote their noble appeal to the Pope, "What we want." For this end, when Pius X refused to heed their cry, they flung to the whole world their reply, "The Programme of the Modernists." This ideal of a renewed Catholicism it is that holds them steadfast as reformers within the Church even while its hierarchy would cast them out as apostates. In this faith, when threatened with excommunication, they confess, "We are ready to suffer." In this abiding sense of their fellowship with the Church of yesterday and of to-morrow they refuse to withdraw themselves from the Church of to-day. Hence it is that from many different quarters is heard the common rallying call-Reform within the Roman Church.

This note distinguishes this movement not only from the Protestant Reformation, but also from the Old Catholic secession of our times. In the sixteenth century the world was ready for revolution, but not ripe for quiet religious evolution. Protestantism must needs come and take its king

dom by violence; and when in 1870 the later growth of papal absolutism culminated in the Vatican decree of infallibility, the German scholarship which had arrayed in vain early Church history against it, was forced to break forthwith from Rome, or to deny itself. It was an ecclesiastical duel within circumscribed limits. Can these modernists do otherwise? Can they escape the same logic of events that compelled Professor Döllinger, the great scholar and leader of the Old Catholics, reluctantly to see his own protest issue in the Old Catholic schism? Time will show.

There are two considerations which are enough to justify the present determination of the Neo-Catholics to labor and to wait for the renewal of the Roman Church. One is the fact that the religious conditions of this century are not those of any preceding age. Evolution is the order of our times alike in political, economic, social and religious life. It is one of the striking and reassuring signs of our times that the underlying will of the people is to reform but not to destroy their whole inheritance from the past.

The other consideration-and it is of distinctive significance is that modernism is not compelled, like the Old Catholic Church, to split off from Rome at a single divisive point of doctrine. NeoCatholicism was not at first a dogmatic challenge; rather it was an excursion of investigating minds out into the open country. The modernists would seek until they find the vitalizing truth at the source of all the rites and dogmas of the Church. They would come not to destroy but to fulfil the law and the prophets of the Roman Church. "We are not rebels," those Italian priests say to the Pope. In France the Abbé Loisy declares, "I have always regarded it as a duty to remain in the Church." Tyrrell in England says that he abhors "runaway solutions.”

When charged with inconsistency and weakness in not tearing themselves at once free from Rome, they remind us that the Apostolic community continued to frequent

the Hebrew temple, and to mingle their prayers with those of the people faithful to Moses, although their new faith was different from that of the circumcision. "We follow at all times," these Italian modernists say, "the practice of the Catholic worship together with the people; we celebrate the rites, we live in the midst of the same religious life, although our belief is different, our ideality changed." They can allow no papal ban to separate them from their spiritual fellowship in the Church of their devotion and hope. Some of them possibly may be driven by persecutions into hopeless renunciation of it; but the Abbé Loisy spoke for their common spirit and predominant purpose when he declared himself to be a Catholic still; although when an absolute surrender of the conclusions of his lifelong studies of the Scriptures was demanded of him by Cardinal Merry del Val, he answered with a courageous sincerity: "My spirit is as incapable of living in the intellectual atmosphere of the Encyclical as my lungs are of breathing at the bottom of the sea." The NeoCatholics conceive their mission to be not that of the Baptist to lay the axe at the root of the tree; they find their providential call interpreted in the Gospel parable of the leaven, and they believe that modernism is the ferment which in due time shall make of the whole lump of Romanism fresh bread of life for the people.

In this abiding loyalty of spirit to the Catholic Church lies the strength of the modernists. Their position may be regarded as exposed and precarious; but so long as they can hold it, there can be no question of its strategic importance. If driven from it, they might become another sect soon to be brought to a standstill, like the present Old Catholic Church; refusing to surrender this position, they remain a reformatory power confronting the very citadel of pontifical sovereignty.

This outbreak of modernism within the Roman pale has taken the Protestant world generally by surprise. It would be a mistake, however, to regard it as an affair of to-day, having but yesterday its origin. It has long been growing in quiet places. Without observation the seeds of it have been scattered far and wide. Indeed we have to go back to the first half of the last century to find in Roman Catholic writings

the early springs of this movement; its present increasing volume is the confluence of many tendencies from the past, the fulness of influences that are now flowing together from widely distant sources.

It would be equally a mistake to presume that modernism is but a reflection of Protestant thought among Roman Catholics. On the contrary, Catholic scholars have beaten from their own laborious studies the oil for its lamp. Protestant and Catholic scholars, it is true, have toiled of late years in friendly intercourse, especially in the fields of early Christian history and Biblical criticism. They have drawn together from common sources of modern philosophy and science. In some German universities a promising fraternity between Protestant and Catholic faculties has been springing up, which now the blow of ultramontane authority would cut down. But while mutual appreciation and sympathy are growing between liberal Catholicism and progressive Protestantism, it is also true that Neo-Catholicism has struck its roots down deeply into its own soil, and its natural fruitage is not another Protestantism. These modernists, indeed, in their house of bondage, are not slow to recognize the splendid service of Protestantism to intellectual liberty. But to them Protestantism has presented Christianity as an individual religious experience, while they regard it as essentially a social fact. Protestantism, they say, is individualistic; Catholicism is universalistic. Protestantism affirms the absolute right of private judgment; they would not deny its final authority for the individual; but for the Church the directive authority lies ultimately in the collective conscience of the whole body of believers. Extremes meet; and they protest against the present claim of the sole authority of a single man, the Pope, as in itself an extreme of Protestant individualism, un-Scriptural, unhistorical, and un-Catholic. They look for a truer Catholicism, in which there shall be secured to the individual mind full working freedom while in the growth and welfare of the one body of believers, the Church, spiritual authority shall be realized in the organic control of the whole over the parts. This is not a new Protestantism, although it may have in store for all Protestant bodies a much-needed contribution.

The greatest possible misconception of modernism is the official representation of it as a presumptuous liberalism, itself empty of faith, which would eventually empty religion of all reality. Into this grievous misapprehension of it some conservative Protestants, misled by its most radical Biblical criticism, have too hastily fallen. It will not be so quickly judged by those theological inquirers among us, who learned long since only to smile, and not to be embarrassed, when some small denominational infallibility confronted them with the pleasing dilemma, Give up your new ideas or your Church life! They chose rather to stay in the communions where they were born, and more than once they have lived to see their new theologies entertained as old friends. These Roman modernists will survive the same reproach. It may be granted that in their eager following of the newer scientific methods of investigating the historical origins of Christianity they may, some of them, have ventured beyond the limits of sober Biblical criticism. Among ourselves as well as with them the so-called higher critics do not always perceive clearly the full extent to which the historical Christ authenticates himself in the Gospel narratives. But few, if any, among them would deny that the spiritual superlativeness of Jesus, and the supreme uniqueness of his personality, are facts of history, which have been taken up and interpreted in the faith of Christianity in his divine pre-eminence. They do not profess to have wrought out their philosophy or formulated their theological beliefs. Hence to those who cannot lift up their eyes and believe without definitions, their thought may seem at times vague and their faith illusive. But it is not because they lack positive religious experience. Through much travail of mind they have gained a new spiritual life, and for the hope of it they are willing now to suffer the loss of all things. From such travail there has not come forth another starveling unbelief, always hungry and never fed-a lean, alldevouring scepticism with no enthusiasm for humanity in its heart, and with nerveless touch upon the divine realities. Educated in mediæval scholasticism, many of them have seen the whole raft and framework of St. Thomas Aquinas's syllogisms broken to pieces on the wind-swept flood of

modern thought. All their religious beliefs were embarked on that scholastic system, their spiritual devotions were supported by it; and when it went to pieces beneath them, all seemed lost. Yet in this wreck of their Roman education they have saved their religious life. They have gained the sunny shore; they stand upon the reality of God in history.

It is largely because of this genuineness and positive vitality of their religious experience that they fail to recognize their own portraits in the delineation which the Pope has drawn of their errors and negations. Even when some lines of it resemble their features, it is as a face without its expression-as the countenance of one with the spirit of another. A few points only may here be touched upon to indicate the character of their theological thinking. They are charged with denying that God can be known; they only affirm that God is incomprehensible. This, they say, is not to deny that the knowledge of God is the key to science and history. They are represented as removing all historical ground for Christianity; what they affirm is that faith cannot determine what the historical facts were, but that Christian faith has been and is the interpretation of the facts of history. Critical historical methods search for the facts; faith understands them. The doctrines of the Church represent the moral and spiritual values of the history of religion. Their thought of Christ may seem somewhat mystical and idealized; but in their profound sense of the divine in humanity they themselves have not lost the Christ of their worshipful faith because they seek to find again the Man of history.

It would be easy to gather from their writings more richly even than from recent Protestant literature, passages of help to those whose minds have been swept loose from their moorings in our churches, and who are adrift in the fogs of agnosticism. Indeed to some of the choicest of such minds one might happily quote the Abbé Loisy's reply to a clerical correspondent who gave to him the advice so familiar to us, not to discuss for the sake of troubled souls. "I also," he wrote, "have known. trouble of soul, not for days, and months, but for years of secret martyrdom. I am not then insensible to the anguish of others.