An Anglican writer has given us a terse expression of the same idea: The Deity, we are told, cannot alter the past. But the ecclesiastical historian can and does.[1]
With all the instinct of self-preservation, the Ultramontane mistrusted and resented the historical School. Cardinal Wiseman wrote in a Pastoral[2] a severe denunciation of the journal which Acton edited. To the Cardinal, the Home and Foreign Review seemed characterised by "the absence for years of all reserve and reverence in its treatment of persons or of things deemed sacred." He wrote with great severity on what appeared to him its "habitual preference of uncatholic to Catholic instincts, tendencies, and motives."
Acton[3] admitted in his reply that "a very formidable mass of ecclesiastical authority and popular feeling was united against certain principles or opinions which, whether rightly or wrongly, are attributed to us." He then proceeded to give an account of the principles which ought to govern the attitude of Catholics towards modern discoveries.
"A political law or a scientific truth may be perilous to the morals or the faith of individuals, but it cannot on this ground be resisted by the Church. It may at times be a duty of the State to protect freedom of conscience, yet this freedom may be a temptation to apostasy. A discovery may be made in science which will shake the faith of thousands, yet religion cannot refute it or object to it. The difference in this respect between a true and a false religion is, that one judges all things by the standard of their truth, the other by the touchstone of its own interests."[4]
