Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1908. Excerpt: ... Flotsam and Jetsam. The ftodernists of the Thirteenth Century. As we all know, there is nothing to which our Modernists more loudly appeal in justification of their position than the demands of criticism, of which it might almost be supposed that they claim a monopoly; but when, in their anxiety to make some point which shall discredit the Encyclical directed against them, they deal with positive matters of fact, it frequently happens that their practice is by no means such as their declarations might lead us to expect, and that very little examination of the subject they discuss altogether changes its aspect. What, for instance, has been more confidently asserted, than that in the thirteenth century the scholastic philosophy itself, which the Church now adopts and eulogizes, was, on its first appearance, vehemently denounced by the reigning Pope, Gregory IX., who condemned its pioneers even as the Modernists are condemned to-day? Thus, M.Francis Charmes, in the Revue des Deux Mondes,1 declares that a passage in the Encyclical has thrown him into a kind of historic reverie, that, namely, in which is cited a letter of the Pope to the Theologians of the University of Paris. Some of these, says the Pontiff, commit the error of subordinating the truths of religion to the teachings of human philosophy, allowing themselves to be seduced by strange and fantastic doctrines. But what, asks M. Charmes, was the human philosophy in question? No other than that of Aristotle, which St. Thomas was presently to adopt, and bring to so much honour. Such an example, he concludes, authorizes us to appeal from the Pope to the Pope himself, for he supposes, not quite accurately, that Gregory a few years later withdrew his own prohibition, while his successors did much more to confirm its ascendency. It w...