Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/605

Rh and Father Savi, and in France Mon seigneur d'Hulst, the Abbé Loisy, Professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute, whose researches into biblical and other ancient history and literature had won him distinction throughout the world. These men, while standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to allow that some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism were well founded. The result came rapidly. The treatise of Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on the Index; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually silenced; the Abbé Loisy was first deprived of his professorship, and then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.

The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of the Church, for, in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter on The Study of Sacred Scripture by the reigning Pope, Leo XIII. Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century, there has sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so competent to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted to the older beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would crush the whole brood of biblical critics, votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope that the encyclical might, in the language of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged orthodoxy from established science."

Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole, it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate itself upon this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic, won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist that there can be no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even defended those parts which Protestants count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but written by God. His Holiness naturally condemned the higher criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance