Page:What We Want.djvu/72

 spirit, to consider their work in relation to their time and to the men with whom they lived, to live in our turn after this spirit, and act according to it in relation to our time and our contemporaries. There is, therefore, no reason to be scandalized if many of our opinions and ideas do not correspond with theirs, formed as they were in a quite different atmosphere; and if we, while still respecting the religious and moral values which they, through their faith, derived from them, cannot accept many of the traditions which, in their ignorance of historical criticism, they accepted and spread abroad. Our adhesion to certain beliefs and traditions fails, at times, for the similar reason that criticism forces us to reject some of the legends which have sprung up in our own days concerning certain saints—as, for instance, St. Expeditus and St. Philumena. Or, again, criticism forces us to refuse adhesion to certain assertions determined by the blind faith of souls,