Now that is exactly the position in which the Catholic reader stands in regard to Mr. Wells’s quite insufficient way of dealing with the question of the original doctrine of the Incarnation.
That question must be put quite clearly at the outset. We are not discussing the truth or falsehood of the Incarnation, that is, of Christ’s Godhead. We are discussing the purely historical point, whether or no that doctrine is original to the Christian Church and its founder.
Was the idea of the Incarnation, that is, of the Divinity of Our Lord, held by those who had seen and known Him; did they claim to have received it from Himself; did they record His own witness to it? Or is the whole thing a later imposition?
That is the point; and it is a point not of Faith but of History.
A writer is free to call the visions and voices of St. Joan illusions, and yet to remain a sound historian in the ordinary acceptation of that term; but if he denies that St. Joan herself and her contemporaries believed she had had such experiences, then he is an absurd historian.
It is clear, on reading Mr. Wells’s pages, that he has never come across the historical arguments for regarding belief in the Incarnation as contemporary with Our Lord and His companions. He does not know of their existence. He approaches the problem as though all the world would readily agree with his own cheerfully uninformed conclusions—because he has never heard of any other. He obviously thinks that those who accept as historical Christ’s own gradual revelation of the doctrine, and its acceptation by certain contemporaries, are merely doing so to order. He thinks they have not read even as much (or as little) as he, and have only to be enlightened. He has no idea that a convincing body of evidence exists and has been marshalled by powerful and numerous pens.
Let me begin with the common view which Mr. Wells here repeats.
It is essentially the view of Modernists of a particular type, to wit, Modernists of the Protestant type, and of the Protestant type which flourishes chiefly in the world to which Mr. Wells himself belongs. It is not of the German sort, still less of the French sort; it is of the sort which you find in the more popular Sunday journals of the London Press. And here we must define what the Modernist is.
The Modernist is a man who, having lost his faith in whatever Catholic doctrine he or his may have held, is afraid of facing the consequences of that loss.
That is an exact definition. A man is not a Modernist who denies all Catholic doctrine en bloc, from the Omnipotence and Personality of God downwards, and accepts the consequences of such a denial.