ot, then, become needful to reject the claim of the papacy
to the employment of coercion in the maintenance of its opinions; to
repudiate utterly the declaration that "the Inquisition is an urgent
necessity in view of the unbelief of the present age," and in the name
of human nature to protest loudly against the ferocity and terrorism of
that institution? Has not conscience inalienable rights?

An impassable and hourly-widening gulf intervenes between Catholicism
and the spirit of the age. Catholicism insists that blind faith is
superior to reason; that mysteries are of more importance than facts.
She claims to be the sole interpreter of Nature and revelation, the
supreme arbiter of knowledge; she summarily rejects all modern criticism
of the Scriptures, and orders the Bible to be accepted in accordance
with the views of the theologians of Trent; she openly avows her hatred
of free institutions and constitutional systems, and declares that those
are in damnable error who regard the reconciliation of the pope with
modern civilization as either possible or desirable.

SCIENCE AND PROTESTANTISM. But the spirit of the age demands--is the
human intellect to be subordinated to the Tridentine Fathers, or to the
fancy of illiterate and uncritical persons who wrote in the earlier ages
of the Church? It sees no merit in blind faith, but rather distrusts it.
It looks forward to an improvement in the popular canon of credibility
for a decision between fact and fiction. It does not consider itself
bound to believe fables and falsehoods that have been invented for
ecclesiastical ends. It finds no argument in behalf of their truth, that
traditions and legends have been long-lived; in this respect, those of
the Church are greatly inferior to the fables of paganism. The longevity
of the Church itself is not due to divine protection or intervention,
but to the skill with which it has adapted its policy to existing
circumstances. If antiquity be the criterion of authenticity, the claims
of Buddhism must be respected; it has the superior warrant of many
centuries. There can be no defense of those deliberate falsifications of
history, that concealment of historical facts, of which the Church has
so often taken advantage. In these things the end does not justify the
means.

Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science
are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely
incompatible; they cannot exist