Page:What We Want.djvu/81

 You do not consider that antimodernism may be the patent of ignorance and self-interest. Every one in these days is dinning into your ears accusations of modernism, of that bête noire which no one knows, of that horrible spectre which every one believes he has recognized, but which no one can define otherwise than as "the heresy which contains all the heresies and errors of the past"; and you blindly listen to their pious indignation, and will not see that most frequently these defenders of faith and morals are slaves of incontinence, of insincerity, of sloth, of ignorance. Yet against them not even the authority of Bishops of proved holiness and learning is of any avail.

It is the voice of the young only that you will not hear, of those younger men whom you so fiercely abuse, both in public and in private, in Allocutions and Encyclicals, whom you accuse and inexorably condemn, but of whom you have so little direct knowledge. Yet we have