owledge. An
entire obedience to the decrees of the Holy See and the Roman
congregations cannot be inconsistent with the freedom and progress of
science. The disposition to find fault with the scholastic theology, and
to dispute the conclusions and the method of its teachers, threatens the
authority of the Church, because the Church has not only allowed
theology to remain for centuries faithful to their system, but has
urgently recommended it as the safest bulwark of the faith, and an
efficient weapon against her enemies. Catholic writers are not bound
only by those decisions of the infallible Church which regard articles
of faith. They must also submit to the theological decisions of the
Roman congregations, and to the opinions which are commonly received in
the schools. And it is wrong, though not heretical, to reject those
decisions or opinions.

In a word, therefore, the Brief affirms that the common opinions and
explanations of Catholic divines ought not to yield to the progress of
secular science, and that the course of theological knowledge ought to
be controlled by the decrees of the Index.

There is no doubt that the letter of this document might be interpreted
in a sense consistent with the habitual language of the _Home and
Foreign Review_. On the one hand, the censure is evidently aimed at that
exaggerated claim of independence which would deny to the Pope and the
Episcopate any right of interfering in literature, and would transfer
the whole weight heretofore belonging to the traditions of the schools
of theology to the incomplete, and therefore uncertain, conclusions of
modern science. On the other hand, the _Review_ has always maintained,
in common with all Catholics, that if the one Church has an organ it is
through that organ that she must speak; that her authority is not
limited to the precise sphere of her infallibility; and that opinions
which she has long tolerated or approved, and has for centuries found
compatible with the secular as well as religious knowledge of the age,
cannot be lightly supplanted by new hypotheses of scientific men, which
have not yet had time to prove their consistency with dogmatic truth.
But such a plausible accommodation, even if it were honest or dignified,
would only disguise and obscure those ideas which it has been the chief
object of the _Review_ to proclaim. It is, therefore, not only more
respectful to the Holy See, but more serviceable to the principles of
the _R