e one stock argument. Again, I have not to
speak of any relations of the Church to the new sciences, because my
simple question all along has been whether the assumption of
infallibility by the proper authority is adapted to make me a hypocrite,
and till that authority passes decrees on pure physical subjects and
calls on me to subscribe them, (which it never will do, because it has
not the power,) it has no tendency to interfere by any of its acts with
my private judgment on those points. The simple question is, whether
authority has so acted upon the reason of individuals, that they can
have no opinion of their own, and have but an alternative of slavish
superstition or secret rebellion of heart; and I think the whole history
of theology puts an absolute negative upon such a supposition.

It is hardly necessary to argue out so plain a point. It is individuals,
and not the Holy See, that have taken the initiative, and given the lead
to the Catholic mind, in theological inquiry. Indeed, it is one of the
reproaches urged against the Roman Church, that it has originated
nothing, and has only served as a sort of _remora_ or break in the
development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I really embrace
as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its
extraordinary gift. It is said, and truly, that the Church of Rome
possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution. Afterwards
for a long while, it has not a single doctor to show; St. Leo, its
first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine; St. Gregory, who stands
at the very extremity of the first age of the Church, has no place in
dogma or philosophy. The great luminary of the western world is, as we
know, St. Augustine; he, no infallible teacher, has formed the intellect
of Christian Europe; indeed to the African Church generally we must look
for the best early exposition of Latin ideas. Moreover, of the African
divines, the first in order of time, and not the least influential, is
the strong-minded and heterodox Tertullian. Nor is the Eastern
intellect, as such, without its share in the formation of the Latin
teaching. The free thought of Origen is visible in the writings of the
Western Doctors, Hilary and Ambrose; and the independent mind of Jerome
has enriched his own vigorous commentaries on Scripture, from the stores
of the scarcely orthodox Eusebius. Heretical questionings have been
transmuted by the living power of the Church into salutary