lations of
subjects and authorities. The principle which places right above
expedience in the political action of the Church has an equal
application in history or in astronomy. The Church can no more identify
her cause with scientific error than with political wrong. Her interests
may be impaired by some measure of political justice, or by the
admission of some fact or document. But in neither case can she guard
her interests at the cost of denying the truth.

This is the principle which has so much difficulty in obtaining
recognition in an age when science is more or less irreligious, and when
Catholics more or less neglect its study. Political and intellectual
liberty have the same claims and the same conditions in the eyes of the
Church. The Catholic judges the measures of governments and the
discoveries of science in exactly the same manner. Public law may make
it imperative to overthrow a Catholic monarch, like James II., or to
uphold a Protestant monarch, like the King of Prussia. The
demonstrations of science may oblige us to believe that the earth
revolves round the sun, or that the _donation of Constantine_ is
spurious. The apparent interests of religion have much to say against
all this; but religion itself prevents those considerations from
prevailing. This has not been seen by those writers who have done most
in defence of the principle. They have usually considered it from the
standing ground of their own practical aims, and have therefore failed
to attain that general view which might have been suggested to them by
the pursuit of truth as a whole. French writers have done much for
political liberty, and Germans for intellectual liberty; but the
defenders of the one cause have generally had so little sympathy with
the other, that they have neglected to defend their own on the grounds
common to both. There is hardly a Catholic writer who has penetrated to
the common source from which they spring. And this is the greatest
defect in Catholic literature, even to the present day.

In the majority of those who have afforded the chief examples of this
error, and particularly in Lamennais, the weakness of faith which it
implies has been united with that looseness of thought which resolves
all knowledge into opinion, and fails to appreciate methodical
investigation or scientific evidence. But it is less easy to explain how
a priest, fortified with the armour of German science, should have
failed as completely in