lasted for about a dozen
years, during which enemies of dogma, of all complexions, were less
reticent and more aggressive than at any other time in the century. Lord
Morley has observed that "the force of speculative literature always
hangs on practical opportuneness," and this remark is illustrated by the
rationalistic literature of the seventies. It was a time of hope and
fear, of progress and danger. Secularists and rationalists were
encouraged by the Disestablishment of the Church in Ireland (1869), by
the Act which allowed atheists to give evidence in a court of justice
(1869), by the abolition of religious tests at all the universities (a
measure frequently attempted in vain) in 1871. On the other hand, the
Education Act of 1870, progressive though it was, disappointed the
advocates of secular education, and was an unwelcome sign of the
strength of ecclesiastical influence. Then there was the general alarm
felt in Europe by all outside the Roman Church,

[210] and by some within it, at the decree of the infallibility of the
Pope (by the Vatican Council 1869-70), and an Englishman (Cardinal
Manning) was one of the most active spirits in bringing about this
decree. It would perhaps have caused less alarm if the Pope's
denunciation of modern errors had not been fresh in men's memories. At
the end of 1864 he startled the world by issuing a Syllabus "embracing
the principal errors of our age." Among these were the propositions,
that every man is free to adopt and profess the religion he considers
true, according to the light of reason; that the Church has no right to
employ force; that metaphysics can and ought to be pursued without
reference to divine and ecclesiastical authority; that Catholic states
are right to allow foreign immigrants to exercise their own religion in
public; that the Pope ought to make terms with progress, liberalism, and
modern civilization. The document was taken as a declaration of war
against enlightenment, and the Vatican Council as the first strategic
move of the hosts of darkness. It seemed that the powers of obscurantism
were lifting up their heads with a new menace, and there was an
instinctive feeling that all the forces of reason should be brought into
the field. The history of the last forty years shows that the theory of

[211] Infallibility, since it has become a dogma, is not more harmful
than it was before. But the efforts of the Catholic Church in the years
following the Council