ave had a more fatal operation than those conflicts with
science and literature which have led men to dispute the competence, or
the justice, or the wisdom, of her authorities. Rare as such conflicts
have been, they have awakened a special hostility which the defenders of
Catholicism have not succeeded in allaying. They have induced a
suspicion that the Church, in her zeal for the prevention of error,
represses that intellectual freedom which is essential to the progress
of truth; that she allows an administrative interference with
convictions to which she cannot attach the stigma of falsehood; and that
she claims a right to restrain the growth of knowledge, to justify an
acquiescence in ignorance, to promote error, and even to alter at her
arbitrary will the dogmas that are proposed to faith. There are few
faults or errors imputed to Catholicism which individual Catholics have
not committed or held, and the instances on which these particular
accusations are founded have sometimes been supplied by the acts of
authority itself. Dishonest controversy loves to confound the personal
with the spiritual element in the Church--to ignore the distinction
between the sinful agents and the divine institution. And this confusion
makes it easy to deny, what otherwise would be too evident to question,
that knowledge has a freedom in the Catholic Church which it can find in
no other religion; though there, as elsewhere, freedom degenerates
unless it has to struggle in its own defence.

Nothing can better illustrate this truth than the actual course of
events in the cases of Lamennais and Frohschammer. They are two of the
most conspicuous instances in point; and they exemplify the opposite
mistakes through which a haze of obscurity has gathered over the true
notions of authority and freedom in the Church. The correspondence of
Lamennais and the later writings of Frohschammer furnish a revelation
which ought to warn all those who, through ignorance, or timidity, or
weakness of faith, are tempted to despair of the reconciliation between
science and religion, and to acquiesce either in the subordination of
one to the other, or in their complete separation and estrangement. Of
these alternatives Lamennais chose the first, Frohschammer the second;
and the exaggeration of the claims of authority by the one and the
extreme assertion of independence by the other have led them, by
contrary paths, to nearly the same end.

When Lamennais survey