Excerpt from Newman's Relation to Modernism There are many reasons why this dangerous and disintegrating tendency must be rigorously excluded from Roman Catholicism. In the first place Modernism destroys the historical basis of Christianity, and converts the Incarnation and Atonement into myths like those of other dying and rising saviour-gods, which hardly pretend to be historical. But it was this foundation in history which helped largely to secure the triumph of Christianity over its rivals. In the place of the historical god-man, Modernism gives us the history of the Church as an object of reverence. Further, the religious philosophy of Modernism is bad, much worse than the scholasticism which it derides. It is in essentials a revival of the sophistry of Protagoras. And if it were meta physically more respectable than it is, it is so widely opposed to the whole system of Catholic apologetics, that if it were accepted, it would necessitate a complete reconstruction of Catholic dogma. Catholicism rests on presuppositions which are far removed from those of Modernism. It is one thing to admit that dogmas in many cases have a pragmatic origin, and quite another to say that they may be invented or rejected with a pragmatic purpose. The healthy human intellect will never believe that the same proposition may be true for faith and untrue in fact: but this is the Modernist contention. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.