he ecclesiastical
government. A government does not desire its powers to be strictly
defined, but the subjects require the line to be drawn with increasing
precision. Authority may be protected by its subjects being kept in
ignorance of its faults, and by their holding it in superstitious
admiration. But religion has no communion with any manner of error: and
the conscience can only be injured by such arts, which, in reality, give
a far more formidable measure of the influence of the human element in
ecclesiastical government than any collection of detached cases of
scandal can do. For these arts are simply those of all human governments
which possess legislative power, fear attack, deny responsibility, and
therefore shrink from scrutiny.

One of the great instruments for preventing historical scrutiny had long
been the Index of prohibited books, which was accordingly directed, not
against falsehood only, but particularly against certain departments of
truth. Through it an effort had been made to keep the knowledge of
ecclesiastical history from the faithful, and to give currency to a
fabulous and fictitious picture of the progress and action of the
Church. The means would have been found quite inadequate to the end, if
it had not been for the fact that while society was absorbed by
controversy, knowledge was only valued so far as it served a
controversial purpose. Every party in those days virtually had its own
prohibitive Index, to brand all inconvenient truths with the note of
falsehood. No party cared for knowledge that could not be made available
for argument. Neutral and ambiguous science had no attractions for men
engaged in perpetual combat. Its spirit first won the naturalists, the
mathematicians, and the philologists; then it vivified the otherwise
aimless erudition of the Benedictines; and at last it was carried into
history, to give new life to those sciences which deal with the
tradition, the law, and the action of the Church.

The home of this transformation was in the universities of Germany, for
there the Catholic teacher was placed in circumstances altogether novel.
He had to address men who had every opportunity of becoming familiar
with the arguments of the enemies of the Church, and with the
discoveries and conclusions of those whose studies were without the bias
of any religious object. Whilst he lectured in one room, the next might
be occupied by a pantheist, a rationalist, or a Lutheran, descanti