may not dissemble them, in presence of the more rigorous necessity of
the salvation of souls and the more certain truth of the dogmas of
faith? This question divides Protestants into rationalists and pietists.
The Church solves it in practice, by admitting the truths and the
principles in the gross, and by dispensing them in detail as men can
bear them. She admits the certainty of the mathematical method, and she
uses the historical and critical method in establishing the documents of
her own revelation and tradition. Deny this method, and her recognised
arguments are destroyed. But the Church cannot and will not deny the
validity of the methods upon which she is obliged to depend, not indeed
for her existence, but for her demonstration. There is no opening for
Catholics to deny, in the gross, that political science may have
absolute principles of right, or intellectual science of truth.

During the last hundred years Catholic literature has passed through
three phases in relation to this question. At one time, when absolutism
and infidelity were in the ascendant, and the Church was oppressed by
governments and reviled by the people, Catholic writers imitated, and
even caricatured the early Christian apologists in endeavouring to
represent their system in the light most acceptable to one side or the
other, to disguise antagonism, to modify old claims, and to display only
that side of their religion which was likely to attract toleration and
good will. Nothing which could give offence was allowed to appear.
Something of the fulness, if not of the truth, of religion was
sacrificed for the sake of conciliation. The great Catholic revival of
the present century gave birth to an opposite school. The attitude of
timidity and concession was succeeded by one of confidence and triumph.
Conciliation passed into defiance. The unscrupulous falsehoods of the
eighteenth century had thrown suspicion on all that had ever been
advanced by the adversaries of religion; and the belief that nothing
could be said for the Church gradually died away into the conviction
that nothing which was said against her could be true. A school of
writers arose strongly imbued with a horror of the calumnies of infidel
philosophers and hostile controversialists, and animated by a sovereign
desire to revive and fortify the spirit of Catholics. They became
literary advocates. Their only object was to accomplish the great work
before them; and they were often