Pius X, 1903-1914

of Christian, inasmuch as it corresponds more fully with the origins of Christianity.

2083. There is something else besides in this part of their doctrine, which is absolutely inimical to Catholic truth. For the precept regarding experience is applied also to tradition, which the Church has hitherto asserted, and utterly destroys it. For the modernists understand tradition thus: that it is a kind of communication with others of an original experience, through preaching by means of the intellectual formula. To this formula, therefore, besides, as they say, representative force, they ascribe a kind of suggestive power, not only to excite in him who believes the religious sense, which perchance is becoming sluggish, and to restore the experience once acquired, but also to give birth in them who do not yet believe, to a religious sense for the first time, and to produce the experience. Thus, moreover, religious experience is spread widely among the people; and not only among those who are now in existence, but also among posterity, both by books and by oral transmission from one to another.—But this communication of experience sometimes takes root and flourishes; sometimes it grows old suddenly, and dies. Moreover, to flourish is to the modernists an argument for truth; for they hold truth and life to be the same. Therefore, we may infer again: that all religions, as many as exist, are true; for otherwise they would not be alive.

2084. Now with our discussion brought to this point, Venerable Brethren, we have enough and more to consider accurately what relationship the modernists establish between faith and science; furthermore, history, also, is classed by them under this name of science.—And in the first place, indeed, it is to be held that the object-matter of the one is entirely extraneous to the object-matter of the other and separated from it. For faith looks only to that which science professes to be unknowable to itself. Hence to each is a different duty: science is concerned with phenomena where there is no place for faith; faith, on the other hand, is concerned with the divine, of which science is totally ignorant. Thus, finally, it is settled that there can never be dissension between faith and science; for if each holds its own place, they will never be able to meet each other, and so contradict each other. If any persons by chance object to this, on the ground that certain things occur in visible nature which pertain also to faith, as, for example, the human life of Christ, the modernists will deny it. For, although these things are classified with phenomena, yet, insofar as they are imbued with the life of faith, and in the manner already mentioned have been transfigured and disfigured by faith [cf. n. 2076], they have been snatched away from the sensible world and transferred into material for the divine. Therefore, to him who asks further whether Christ performed true miracles and