Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/139

 ] An Anglican writer has given us a terse expression of the same idea: The Deity, we are told, cannot alter the past. But the ecclesiastical historian can and does.

With all the instinct of self-preservation, the Ultramontane mistrusted and resented the historical School. Cardinal Wiseman wrote in a Pastoral a severe denunciation of the journal which Acton edited. To the Cardinal, the Home and Foreign Review seemed characterised by "the absence for years of all reserve and reverence in its treatment of persons or of things deemed sacred." He wrote with great severity on what appeared to him its "habitual preference of uncatholic to Catholic instincts, tendencies, and motives."

Acton admitted in his reply that "a very formidable mass of ecclesiastical authority and popular feeling was united against certain principles or opinions which, whether rightly or wrongly, are attributed to us." He then proceeded to give an account of the principles which ought to govern the attitude of Catholics towards modern discoveries.