rd Byron and
others. Now, as then, I have no sympathy with the philosophy of
Byron. Afterwards, Liberalism was the badge of a theological school,
of a dry and repulsive character, not very dangerous in itself,
though dangerous as opening the door to evils which it did not itself
either anticipate or comprehend. Now it is nothing else than that
deep, plausible scepticism, of which I spoke above, as being the
development of human reason, as practically exercised by the natural
man.

The Liberal religionists of this day are a very mixed body, and
therefore I am not intending to speak against them. There may be, and
doubtless is, in the hearts of some or many of them a real antipathy
or anger against revealed truth, which it is distressing to think of.
Again; in many men of science or literature there may be an animosity
arising from almost a personal feeling; it being a matter of party, a
point of honour, the excitement of a game, or a consequence of
soreness or annoyance occasioned by the acrimony or narrowness of
apologists for religion, to prove that Christianity or that Scripture
is untrustworthy. Many scientific and literary men, on the other
hand, go on, I am confident, in a straightforward impartial way, in
their own province and on their own line of thought, without any
disturbance from religious opinion in themselves, or any wish at all
to give pain to others by the result of their investigations. It
would ill become me, as if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to
blame those who pursue secular facts, by means of the reason which
God has given them, to their logical conclusions: or to be angry with
science because religion is bound to take cognizance of its teaching.
But putting these particular classes of men aside, as having no
special call on the sympathy of the Catholic, of course he does most
deeply enter into the feelings of a fourth and large class of men, in
the educated portions of society, of religious and sincere minds, who
are simply perplexed--frightened or rendered desperate, as the case
may be--by the utter confusion into which late discoveries or
speculations have thrown their most elementary ideas of religion. Who
does not feel for such men? who can have one unkind thought of them?
I take up St. Augustine's beautiful words, "Illi in vos saeviant,"
etc. Let them be fierce with you who have no experience of the
difficulty with which error is discriminated from truth, and the way
of life is found