Page:History of Freedom.djvu/527

 CONFLICTS WITH ROME

483

In a \vord, therefore, the Brief affirms that the common opinions and explanations of Catholic divines ought not to yield to the progress of secular science, and that the course of theological knowledge ought to be controlled by the decrees of the Index. There is no doubt that the letter. of this document might be interpreted in a sense consistent with the habitual language of the Home and Foreign Review. On the one hand, the censure is evidently aimed at that exaggerated claim of independence which would deny to the Pope and the Episcopate any right of interfering in literature, and would transfer the whole weight heretofore belonging to the traditions of the schools of theology to the incom plete, and therefore uncertain, conclusions of modern science. On the other hand, the Review has always maintained, in common with all Catholics, that if the one Church has an organ it is through that organ that she must speak; that her authority is not limited to the precise sphere of her infallibility; and that opinions which she has long tolerated or approved, and has for centuries found compatible with the secular as well as religious knowledge of the age, cannot be lightly supplanted by new hypotheses of scientific men, which have not yet had time to prove their consistency with dogmatic truth. But such a plausible accommodation, even if it were honest or dignified, would only disguise and obscure those ideas which it has been the chief object of the Review to proclaim. It is, therefore, not only more respectful to the Holy See, but more serviceable to 'the principles of the Review itself, and more in accordance with the spirit in \vhich it has been conducted, to interpret the ,vords of the Pope as they were really meant, than to elude their consequences by subtle distinctions, and to profess a formal adoption of maxims which no man who holds the principles of the Review can accept in their intended signification. One of these maxims is that theological land other opinions long held and allowed in the Church gather truth from time, and an authority in some sort binding