Is it Modernism?

Extract

The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.

It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful; i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.