And this led Acton to pronounce a severe criticism on methods of defence prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church of the day. He said that in reaction from the unscrupulous attacks of the eighteenth century, a school of apologists had arisen dominated by the opinion that nothing said against the Church could be true. Their only object was defence. "They were often careless in statement, rhetorical and illogical in argument, too positive to be critical and too confident to be precise." "In this school," he continues, "the present generation of Catholics was educated." And he complains that "the very qualities which we condemn in our opponents, as the natural defences of error, and the significant emblems of a bad cause, came to taint both our literature and our policy." Meanwhile, learning had passed on beyond the vision of such apologists, and the apologists have, so far as effectiveness is concerned, collapsed before it.
"Investigations have become so impersonal, so colourless, so free from the prepossessions which distort truth, from predetermined aims and foregone conclusions, that their results can only be met by investigations in which the same methods are yet more completely and conscientiously applied."[1]
Resort to suppressive methods is, Acton was profoundly persuaded, suicidal as well as immoral. It argues either a timid faith which fears the light, or a false morality which would do evil that good might come. "How often have Catholics involved themselves in hopeless contradiction, sacrificed principle to opportunity, adapted their theories to their interest, and staggered the world's reliance on their sincerity by subterfuges which entangle the Church in the
- ↑ Acton, History of Freedom, p. 452.
