Here is preserved all that great range of deep feeling and all that fine energy of unselfish earnestness which have given to Christianity the most effectual of its impulses.

A man may still worship Christ, and still make obedience to the Will of Christ the chief passion or object of his existence, although he no longer believes that Jesus was either born out of the order of nature or died to turn away the vengeance of God from a world which had sinned itself beyond the reach of infinite love.
Like Goethe, such a man will say: "As soon as the pure doctrine and love of Christ are comprehended in their true nature, and have become a living principle, we shall feel ourselves great and free as human beings, and not attach special importance to a degree more or less in the outward forms of religion." The critics of modernism do not seem able, for some reason, to grasp a truth which has been apparent all down the ages, a truth so old that it is almost entitled to be regarded as a tradition, and so widely held that it is almost worthy to be called catholic, namely, the truth that Jesus loses none of His power over human history so long as He abides a living principle in the hearts of individual men.

So long as He expresses for mankind the Character of God and reveals to mankind the nature of God's purpose, so long as men love Him as they love no other, and set themselves to make His spirit tell, first in their lives and after that in the world about them, does it greatly matter whether they speak of His divinity or His uniqueness, whether they accept definitions concerning Him (framed by men in the dark ages) or go about to do His will with no definitions in their mind at all beyond the intellectual conviction that here is One who spoke as no other man has spoken since the creation of the world?
Canon Barnes, who disowns the name of modernist, but who is the very opposite of an obscurantist in his evangelicalism, is careful to insist upon a _rational_ loyalty to Christ.

I tried one day to tempt him on this head, speaking of the miraculous changes wrought in men's lives by religious fervour pure and simple; but it was in vain.

He agrees that religious fervour may work such miracles: he is the last man in the world to dismiss these miracles as curious and interesting phenomena of psychology; but he insists, and is like a rock on this matter, that emotional Christianity is not safe without an intellectual background.
He makes me feel that his modernism, if I may presume to use that term, is an evangelical desire of his soul to give men this intellectual background to their faith.