Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/576



570 REVIEW OF HIS PONTIFICATE.

The Church the enemy of knowledge and instruction! Without doubt she is the vigilant guardian of revealed dogma, but it is this very vigilance which prompts her to protect science and to favor the wise cultivation of the mind. No! in submitting his mind to the revelation of the Word, who is the supreme truth from whom all truths must flow, man will in no wise contradict what reason discovers. On the contrary, the light which will come to him from the divine Word will give more power and more clearness to the human intellect, because it will preserve it from a thousand uncertainties and errors. Besides, nineteen centuries of a glory achieved by Ca- thohcism in all the branches of learning amply suffice to refute this calumny. It is to the Catholic Church that we must ascribe the merit of having propagated and defended Christian philosophy, without which the world would still be buried in the darkness of pagan superstitions and in the most abject barbarism. It has preserved and trans- mitted to all generations the precious treasure of htera- ture and of the ancient sciences. It has opened the first schools for the people and crowded the universities which still exist, or whose glory is perpetuated even to our own days. It has inspired the loftiest, the purest, and the most glorious literature, while it has gathered under its protection men whose genius in the arts has never been eclipsed.

The Church the enemy of liberty ! Ah, how they travesty the idea of liberty which has for its object one of the most precious of God's gifts when they make use of its name to justify its abuse and excess! What do we mean by liberty? Does it mean the exemption from all laws; the deliverance from all restraint, and as a corollary, the right to take man's caprice as a guide in all our actions? Such liberty the Church certainly reproves, and good and honest men reprove it likewise. But do they mean by liberty the rational faculty to do good, magnanimously, without check or hindrance and according to the rules