FAITH OF A BISHOP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19810, 3 December 1927, Page 14

FAITH OF A BISHOP.

BOOK BY DR. BARNES, DOCTRINAL BELIEFS STATED. (Received December 2, 6.45 p.m.) 'A. and N.Z. LONDON, Dec. 1. The Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. E. W. Barnes, has published a book entitled Should Such a Faith Offend ? " in answer to his critics. He dissociates himself from the Modernists of the ieft, typified •by the Modernist Roman Catholics, whom Popp Pius X. crushed. Their idea of the Divine Immanence is, he, says, virtually pantheism. " I need," says Dr. Barnes, " a God •who is our Father, who rides the world, and loves the world with a father's love." Dr. Barnes sets aside the accounts of the Incarnation in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and says he prefers the opening of the Gospel according to St. John.

Referring to the Eucharist, he says that as a result of the consecration no spiritual presence is attached to or inheres in the elements. The root# principle of idolatry is the belief that the Deity is localised in material objects, through the invocation of the priest.

Pope Pius IX. stubbornly set his face against th® influence ot modernism on ecclesiastical life and he caused to be published on December 8, 1864, an encyclical, in which modernist heresies were banned. "Under Pope Pius X., a decree "Lamentnbili" was issued in 1907 by the Holy Ofiiee, giving a collection of 65 "Modernist" propositions which' were "condemned.