Page:History of Freedom.djvu/520

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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

This mistrust on the part of the ROlnan divines was fully equalled, and so far justified, by a corresponding literary contempt on the part of many German Catholic scholars. It is easy to understand the grounds of this feeling. The German writers were engaged in an arduous struggle, in which their antagonists were sustained by intellectual po\ver, solid learning, and deep thought, such as the defenders of the Church in Catholic countries have never had to encounter. In this conflict the Italian divines could render no assistance. They had sho\vn themselves altogether incompetent to cope with modern science. The Germans, therefore, unable to recognise them as auxiliaries, soon ceased to regard them as equals, or as scientific divines at all. Without impeaching their orthodoxy, they learned to look on them as men incapable of understanding and mastering the ideas of a literature so very remote from their own, and to attach no more value to the unreasoned decrees of their organ than to the un- defended ipse dixit of a theologian of secondary rank. This opinion sprang, not from national prejudice or from the self-appreciation of individuals comparing their o\vn \vorks \vith those of the Roman divines, but from a general view of the relation of those divines, among whom there are several distinguished Germans, to the literature of Gennany. It was thus a corporate feeling, \vhich might be shared even by one who was conscious of his o\vn inferiority, or \vho had written nothing at all. Such a man, \veighing the opinion of the theologians of the Gesù and the JVIinerva, not in the scale of his own per- formance, but in that of the great achievements of his age, might well be reluctant to accept their verdict upon them without some aid of argument and explanation. On the other hand, it appeared that a blow \vhich struck the Catholic scholars of Germany would assure to the victorious congregation of Roman divines an easy supremacy over the writers of all other countries. The case of Dr. Frohschammer might be made to test what degree of control it would be possible to exercise over his countrymen, the only body of writers at whom alarm