s of error and the
significant emblems of a bad cause, came to taint both our literature
and our policy.

Learning has passed on beyond the range of these men's vision. Their
greatest strength was in the weakness of their adversaries, and their
own faults were eclipsed by the monstrous errors against which they
fought. But scientific methods have now been so perfected, and have come
to be applied in so cautious and so fair a spirit, that the apologists
of the last generation have collapsed before them. Investigations have
become so impersonal, so colourless, so free from the prepossessions
which distort truth, from predetermined aims and foregone conclusions,
that their results can only be met by investigations in which the same
methods are yet more completely and conscientiously applied. The sounder
scholar is invincible by the brilliant rhetorician, and the eloquence
and ingenuity of De Maistre and Schlegel would be of no avail against
researches pursued with perfect mastery of science and singleness of
purpose. The apologist's armour would be vulnerable at the point where
his religion and his science were forced into artificial union. Again,
as science widens and deepens, it escapes from the grasp of
dilettantism. Such knowledge as existed formerly could be borrowed, or
superficially acquired, by men whose lives were not devoted to its
pursuit, and subjects as far apart as the controversies of Scripture,
history, and physical science might be respectably discussed by a single
writer. No such shallow versatility is possible now. The new accuracy
and certainty of criticism have made science unattainable except by
those who devote themselves systematically to its study. The training of
a skilled labourer has become indispensable for the scholar, and science
yields its results to none but those who have mastered its methods.
Herein consists the distinction between the apologists we have described
and that school of writers and thinkers which is now growing up in
foreign countries, and on the triumph of which the position of the
Church in modern society depends. While she was surrounded with men
whose learning was sold to the service of untruth, her defenders
naturally adopted the artifices of the advocate, and wrote as if they
were pleading for a human cause. It was their concern only to promote
those precise kinds and portions of knowledge which would confound an
adversary, or support a claim. But learning ceased to be