hange of explanations. It was a course which had
proved efficacious on other occasions, and in the then recent discussion
of Guenther's system it had been pursued with great patience and decided
success.

Before giving a definite reply, therefore, Dr. Frohschammer asked for
information about the incriminated articles. This would have given him
an opportunity of seeing his error, and making a submission _in foro
interno_. But the request was refused. It was a favour, he was told,
sometimes extended to men whose great services to the Church deserved
such consideration, but not to one who was hardly known except by the
very book which had incurred the censure. This answer instantly aroused
a suspicion that the Roman Court was more anxious to assert its
authority than to correct an alleged error, or to prevent a scandal. It
was well known that the mistrust of German philosophy was very deep at
Rome; and it seemed far from impossible that an intention existed to put
it under all possible restraint.

This mistrust on the part of the Roman divines was fully equalled, and
so far justified, by a corresponding literary contempt on the part of
many German Catholic scholars. It is easy to understand the grounds of
this feeling. The German writers were engaged in an arduous struggle, in
which their antagonists were sustained by intellectual power, solid
learning, and deep thought, such as the defenders of the Church in
Catholic countries have never had to encounter. In this conflict the
Italian divines could render no assistance. They had shown themselves
altogether incompetent to cope with modern science. The Germans,
therefore, unable to recognise them as auxiliaries, soon ceased to
regard them as equals, or as scientific divines at all. Without
impeaching their orthodoxy, they learned to look on them as men
incapable of understanding and mastering the ideas of a literature so
very remote from their own, and to attach no more value to the
unreasoned decrees of their organ than to the undefended _ipse dixit_ of
a theologian of secondary rank. This opinion sprang, not from national
prejudice or from the self-appreciation of individuals comparing their
own works with those of the Roman divines, but from a general view of
the relation of those divines, among whom there are several
distinguished Germans, to the literature of Germany. It was thus a
corporate feeling, which might be shared even by one who was conscious
of his own infer