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Rh the pope. That would bar out for ever all risk of a conflict of clerical wills. Fortune favoured his enterprise. The French bishops of the age of Bossuet had been a powerful estate of the realm, able in some degree to make their own terms with the king himself; their successors in the 19th century were a mere group of salaried public officials. Still more significant changes took place across the Rhine. An appreciable part of the Holy Roman Empire had been in the hands of clerical rulers. At their head stood the electors of Cologne, Mainz and Treves, temporal princes of no mean rank, usually chosen from the cadets of royal houses. But in 1803 electors and prince bishops came to an end. Their domains were secularized, and divided up among their lay neighbours, Prussia securing the lion's share. Thenceforward the German bishops became mere officials, as in France, and Rome had no cause to fear the opposition of another Febronius.

Still remoter was the danger of another Louis XIV. or Joseph II. The time had gone by when sovereigns could decide what particular shade of Catholicism their subjects should assume. Everywhere there was a growing belief that a man's religious tenets were his private affair, with which the state had nothing to do; and that a government only made itself ridiculous if it attempted to lay down which creeds were true and which were false. Hence the clergy were left to do as they pleased, so long as they respected the law of the land; and most of the modern collisions between Church and State have occurred on the debateable ground where their respective spheres overlap, over questions concerning education or the marriage-laws. Noticeable among these quarrels were the so-called Kölnische Wirren of 1837-40, when the archbishop of Cologne defied the Prussian government over the question of “mixed marriages,” and paid for his rashness by a long imprisonment. Such conflicts did much to increase the power of the pope, by encouraging local Churches to turn to him as their protector. To ride rough-shod over individual bishops was nothing to Prussia; but to quarrel mortally with Rome was a serious matter for a sovereign reigning over millions of Catholic subjects. Even more successful were the papal incursions on to a more ethereal domain. Ever since the time of Kant and Goethe, the intellectual leadership of Europe had been slowly passing into the hands of the Germans, and Catholic theology shared the lot of other branches of learning. But the German divines were much more in touch with the world at large than were their brethren in Italy or France; and more than one interesting attempt was made to bring theology into line with modern schools of thought. Joseph von Görres read the medieval mystics in the light of the newer mysticism of Schelling. Hermes of Bonn defended Catholicism from the standpoint of Kant

and Fichte. Continuing his work on a bolder scale, the Viennese priest Günther undertook to show that the articles of the Christian creed are only a rough-and-ready popular statement of the conclusions of philosophy. Of more enduring value have been the researches of the historical school, founded by John Adam Möhler (1796-1838), whose famous Symbolik (1832) was perhaps the heaviest literary blow ever dealt at the Reformation. On his early death his mantle fell on to the shoulders of Ignatius Döllinger (1799-1890). This school claimed that its methods, unlike those of Hermes and Günther, avoided all danger of speculative caprice. Catholicism was considered as an organic growth, developing from certain seminal principles in accordance with certain definite laws. The business of a sound theology was to discover and apply those laws, not to patch up fleeting compromises with the intellectual fashions of an age. On the other hand, the Historical School found but little favour at Rome. “Truth,” as Malebranche quaintly says, “always has a few

hairs on her chin”; and the conclusions of sound learning must needs be slow, fragmentary and tentative. But Italian taste was all for bold, highly-coloured, slashing statements, that any one could understand; what it wanted was a method that should be at once intellectually impressive, and free from the usual clouds that beset the scholar's path. It found what it asked for, when the Jesuits, whom Pius VII. had recalled to life (1814), revived the methods of Aquinas and the medieval Schoolmen. Under the fostering care of Pius IX., this “neo-Scholasticism” spread from Italy to the German Catholic universities, and especially the seminaries of France. The secret of its power was that it gave scope for an immense amount of intellectual subtlety, and at the same time saved men from all danger of independent thought. Although a metaphysic, it was not, and did not pretend to be, an unbiased search for truth. It admittedly started by taking the truth of Catholicism for granted; and its only object was to make intelligible to reason the dogmas that faith already accepted. Thus the whole neo-Scholastic movement played straight into the hands of authority. So comprehensive were its methods, so self-confident its bearing, that those who had once fallen under its spell would never need to doubt or hesitate again. They knew exactly what to think on every conceivable subject; and there was small danger of their suspecting that there might be things in heaven and earth undreamed of in its philosophy.

To the learned Rome might serve up authority with a garnish of neo-Scholastic metaphysics; for average mankind authority pure and simple was enough. Terrified out of their lives at the way in which science and criticism were taking one theological citadel after another, the more militant section of the clergy declared war on thought itself. Not only was faith made independent of reason, but it was considered all the purer, the less it owed to any kind of mental process. If it was a merit to believe without evidence, it was a shining virtue to believe in the teeth of evidence. Credo, quia absurdum was applied, notably by the popular writers of the French Second Empire, in a fashion grotesquely literal enough to scandalize Tertullian himself. “There had always existed in France, as elsewhere, those who loved traditional stories of a marvellous nature, and tended to multiply the number which were presented as facts rather than legends. The existence of this school has always been inseparable from the element of pious belief which enters so much into popular devotion. But in pre-Revolution days there had also been the critical school of the Maurists, which offered an alternative to minds averse from implicit reliance on tradition. This had passed away, and was not yet replaced. The Acta sincera Martyrum by Ruinart was replaced by the thoroughly uncritical and inexact Actes des martyrs of Guéranger. Church history was allowed to be represented by such men as the Abbé Darras; and many French Catholics were ready to accept without question what the Bollandist Père de Smedt has not hesitated to call the historical errors and lies of Charles Bartélémy. Incredible and unsupported stories in history, and extravagances in dogma were the order of the day. Those traditions or doctrines which were most uncongenial to the modern world were placed in strong relief; and the disparagement of the individual intellect was extended to the disparagement of scientific research itself” (Wilfrid Ward, Life of W. G. Ward, vol. ii. p. 119). The faithful were encouraged to drown all tendency to thought in an ever-increasing flood of sensuous emotionalism. In thirty years Pius IX. canonized more saints than all his predecessors together for a century and a half.

In 1854 he gave a great impulse to the cultus of the Virgin by proclaiming her Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Church (see ). In the following year he imposed on Catholicism at large a special “devotion” to the Heart of Mary Immaculate. Next year he added a similar devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (see ).

That these things only widened the breach between the Church and the outside world was of no account to Pius. Ever since his return from Gaeta, he had made up his mind to a policy of no surrender; and the curtailment of his own dominions in 1860 only made him the keener to denounce the iniquities of other rulers. In 1864 appeared the encyclical Quanta Cura,