The Illusiveness of Modern Thought

Extract

Cardinal Newman held that modern thought needed reforming in the light of the Christian revelation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern thought. The opposite and Protestant view prevails with the greater number of our neighbours who profess a theism and do not disdain to be known as Christians.

But what is this modern thought,’ which daily with the steady destructiveness of an encroaching sea wears and crumbles the faith of Anglicans and free-church-men, and from time to time detaches Catholics from the household of faith? Whence comes it? A new impression of the Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation, delivered by Dr. Beard—a nonconformist divine—rather more than forty years ago, prefaced by Dr. Ernest Barker, the distinguished Principal of King’s College, London, bids us place the beginnings of modern thought in the break up of Christendom in the sixteenth century—in ‘the specifically religious revolution which we call the Reformation.’ Dr. Beard, with the persuasive reasonableness of a good Victorian, is content to let modern thought whittle away all Christian dogma, believing that mankind will thereby ‘penetrate more and more deeply into the glory and the wonder of God.’ Dr. Ernest Barker, maintaining that ‘the fundamental meaning of the Reformation is a new theology; and the new theology ‘a purer revelation of God direct to each Christian soul,’ hopes, with Dr. Beard, for ‘a new kindling and a further brightening of its light.’