the discovery that
what they refused to anticipate or to prepare for, is already
accomplished.

Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when
they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge. One source of the
difficulty of which we are speaking is as much a defect of faith as a
defect of knowledge. Just as it is difficult for some Catholics to
believe that the supreme spiritual authority on earth could ever be in
unworthy hands, so they find it hard to reconcile the reverence due to
the Vicar of Christ, and the promises made to him, with the
acknowledgment of intolerable abuses in his temporal administration. It
is a comfort to make the best of the case, to draw conclusions from the
exaggerations, the inventions, and the malice of the accusers against
the justice of the accusation, and in favour of the accused. It is a
temptation to our weakness and to our consciences to defend the Pope as
we would defend ourselves--with the same care and zeal, with the same
uneasy secret consciousness that there are weak points in the case which
can best be concealed by diverting attention from them. What the defence
gains in energy it loses in sincerity; the cause of the Church, which is
the cause of truth, is mixed up and confused with human elements, and
is injured by a degrading alliance. In this way even piety may lead to
immorality, and devotion to the Pope may lead away from God.

The position of perpetual antagonism to a spirit which we abhor; the
knowledge that the clamour against the temporal power is, in very many
instances, inspired by hatred of the spiritual authority; the
indignation at the impure motives mixed up with the movement--all these
things easily blind Catholics to the fact that our attachment to the
Pope as our spiritual Head, our notion that his civil sovereignty is a
safeguard of his freedom, are the real motives of our disposition to
deny the truth of the accusations made against his government. It is
hard to believe that imputations which take the form of insults, and
which strike at the Church through the State, are well founded, and to
distinguish the design and the occasion from the facts. It is, perhaps,
more than we can expect of men, that, after defending the Pope as a
sovereign, because he is a pontiff, and adopting against his enemies the
policy of unconditional defence, they will consent to adopt a view which
corroborates to a great extent the assertions they have combated