MODERNISM. This term has been used since the second decade of the twentieth century (at least as early as 1914) to describe the form which the Broad Church or Liberal Church Movement has taken in the Church of England. The word Mod ernism had been used on the Continent during the pontificate of Leo XIII. as the designation of a neo-scholastic movement in the Roman Catholic Church which was condemned by the Encyclical Pascendi in 1907. The English movement, although in its philos ophy and theology it differs widely from Roman Modernism, yet has affinities with it both in its causes and aim, and has been influenced in some measure by such Roman Catholic Modernist writers as George Tyrrell, F. von Hugel and Alfred Loisy. For instance English Modernists have no difficulty in accepting for themselves Tyrrell's description of Modernism: "I think that the best description of Modernism is that it is the desire and effort to find a new theological synthesis, consistent with the data of historico-critical research. . . . By a Modernist I mean a churchman of any sort who believes in the possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truth of modernity." The following accounts of it by five writers intimately connected with the activities of the English Modernist Movement present it fairly : "Modernism is based upon evolution in science and the critical method in history: and it demands, not that the great truths of the Christian religion shall be given up, but that they shall be considered afresh in the light of growing knowledge, and re-stated in a way suitable to the intellectual conditions of the age." "Modernism seeks to combine in a higher unity the two ways of looking at Christian history, the evolutional and the inspirational." (Professor Percy Gardner.) "Modernism is the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to refashion Christianity, not outside, but inside, the warm limits of the ancient churches, to secure not a reduced, but a transformed Christianity." (Mrs. Humphry Ward.) "I do not disclaim the term Modernist. The name describes justly
what I aim at being. I aim at thinking the thoughts and speaking the language of my own day, and yet, at the same time, keeping all that is essential in the religion of the past." (Canon William Sanday.) "Modernism is only the altogether praiseworthy attempt on the part of a group of thinkers to present Christian truth in terms of modern knowledge. We do not to-day travel by coach, or wear jerkins, or speak the language of Chaucer, or believe that the earth is the centre of the solar system. Why in matters theological should we be forced to think in terms of bygone centuries? Woe betide the Church that shuts its eye to God's gift of new knowledge." (Canon Vernon Storr.) "Modernism is not a religion: it is a defence of religion, and of the Christian Religion." (Dr. R. W. Macan.) The enormous advances made, not only in natural and physical science during the last seventy years, but in literary and historical criticism of the Bible, the history and psychology of religion, anthropology and history, have rendered much of the traditional Christian doctrine untrue in its form, but some of it also untrue in fact. English Modernists, who believe in the essential truth of the Christian Religion and in the indispensable services which the Christian Church, the historic organon of that religion, can per form in the spheres of both personal culture and social evolution, desire to win the Church authorities to the difficult and courageous policy of openly rejecting false tradition, however venerable, and discarding ancient formulae, where repugnant to modern thought and feeling, in favour of teaching which seeks to express the truth of fact and faith in harmony with modern knowledge, conviction, and aspiration.
The Modernist regards his task as twof old :— (i ) The presentation of essential Christian truth in the light of modern knowledge and in such a way that it does not conflict with it: (2) The conversion of the authorities and adherents of the Church to the acceptance, authorization and propagation of Christian doctrine in this new form.