Lenormant were placed on
the Index; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually
silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship, and
then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was
summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.(489)

(489) For the frustration of attempts to admit light into scriptural
studies in Roman Catholic Germany, see Bleek, Old Testament, London,
1882, vol. i, pp. 19, 20. For the general statement regarding recent
suppression of modern biblical study in France and Italy, see an article
by a Roman Catholic author in the Contemporary Review, September, 1894,
p. 365. For the papal condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII,
P.M., etc., Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891. The
ghastly part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is
that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their "errors" and
to acquiesce in the condemnation--Lenorment doing this on his deathbed.

The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of the
Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter by the
reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture.

Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century,
there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so competent
to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted to the older
beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would crush the whole brood
of biblical critics, votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope
that the encyclical might, in the language of one of them, prove "a
stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged
orthodoxy from established science."(490)

(490) For this statement, see an article in the Contemporary Review,
April, 1894, p. 576.

Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole, it is
a question whether the world at large may not congratulate itself upon
this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic, won credit as
"statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist that there can be
no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even defended those parts
which Protestants count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of
Scripture, and declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of
man, but written by God. His Holiness naturally condemned the higher