considered as time-servers, or indifferent to the
cause of uprightness and truth; while, on the other hand, the said
authority may be supported by a violent ultra party, which exalts
opinions into dogmas, and has it principally at heart to destroy
every school of thought but its own.

Such a state of things may be provoking and discouraging at the time,
in the case of two classes of persons; of moderate men who wish to
make differences in religious opinion as little as they fairly can
be made; and of such as keenly perceive, and are honestly eager to
remedy, existing evils--evils, of which divines in this or that
foreign country know nothing at all, and which even at home it is not
every one who has the means of estimating. This is a state of things
both of past time and of the present. We live in a wonderful age; the
enlargement of the circle of secular knowledge just now is simply
a bewilderment, and the more so, because it has the promise of
continuing, and that with greater rapidity, and more signal results.
Now these discoveries, certain or probable, have in matter of fact an
indirect bearing upon religious opinions, and the question arises how
are the respective claims of revelation and of natural science to be
adjusted. Few minds in earnest can remain at ease without some sort
of rational grounds for their religious belief; to reconcile theory
and fact is almost an instinct of the mind. When then a flood of
facts, ascertained or suspected, comes pouring in upon us, with a
multitude of others in prospect, all believers in revelation, be
they Catholic or not, are roused to consider their bearing upon
themselves, both for the honour of God, and from tenderness for those
many souls who, in consequence of the confident tone of the schools
of secular knowledge, are in danger of being led away into a
bottomless liberalism of thought.

I am not going to criticise here that vast body of men, in the mass,
who at this time would profess to be liberals in religion; and who
look towards the discoveries of the age, certain or in progress, as
their informants, direct or indirect, as to what they shall think
about the unseen and the future. The Liberalism which gives a colour
to society now, is very different from that character of thought
which bore the name thirty or forty years ago. It is scarcely now a
party; it is the educated lay world. When I was young, I knew the
word first as giving name to a periodical, set up by Lo