world can never know and recognise her divine perfection
while the pleas of her defenders are scarcely nearer to the truth than
the crimes which her enemies impute to her. How can the stranger
understand where the children of the kingdom are deceived?

Against this policy a firm and unyielding stand is of supreme necessity.
The evil is curable and the loss recoverable by a conscientious
adherence to higher principles, and a patient pursuit of truth and
right. Political science can place the liberty of the Church on
principles so certain and unfailing, that intelligent and disinterested
Protestants will accept them; and in every branch of learning with which
religion is in any way connected, the progressive discovery of truth
will strengthen faith by promoting knowledge and correcting opinion,
while it destroys prejudices and superstitions by dissipating the errors
on which they are founded. This is a course which conscience must
approve in the whole, though against each particular step of it
conscience may itself be tempted to revolt. It does not always conduce
to immediate advantage; it may lead across dangerous and scandalous
ground. A rightful sovereign may exclude the Church from his dominions,
or persecute her members. Is she therefore to say that his right is no
right, or that all intolerance is necessarily wrong? A newly discovered
truth may be a stumbling-block to perplex or to alienate the minds of
men. Is she therefore to deny or smother it? By no means. She must in
every case do right. She must prefer the law of her own general spirit
to the exigencies of immediate external occasion, and leave the issue in
the hands of God.

Such is the substance of those principles which shut out _The Home and
Foreign Review_ from the sympathies of a large portion of the body to
which we belong. In common with no small or insignificant section of our
fellow-Catholics, we hold that the time has gone by when defects in
political or scientific education could be alleged as an excuse for
depending upon expediency or mistrusting knowledge; and that the moment
has come when the best service that can be done to religion is to be
faithful to principle, to uphold the right in politics though it should
require an apparent sacrifice, and to seek truth in science though it
should involve a possible risk. Modern society has developed no security
for freedom, no instrument of progress, no means of arriving at truth,
which we look upon wi