shifting sands of party warfare, instead of establishing her cause on the solid rock of principles!"[1]
This noble appeal was unfortunately denounced by Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham in a Pastoral wholly devoted to its refutation. What particularly disturbed the Bishop's mind was the distinction which Acton drew between a true and a false religion: that one judged all things by the standard of their truth, the other by the touchstone of its own interests. It appeared to Ullathorne[2] that
"to say that the Church cannot refute or object to a discovery which will shake the faith of thousands; meaning thereby to deny her right to examine that discovery after her own methods, and by the union of science with faith in her theology, to ascertain whether and how far that discovery be true, … is to deny to the Church her mission to prove all things, and to hold fast that which is good. It is to deny her the mission of teaching to avoid oppositions of science falsely so called, and of protecting those thousands of souls from having their faith shaken by the erroneous deductions which men of science are too apt to draw from those real discoveries which can never conflict with faith."
Thus was Acton misunderstood. And Bishop Ullathorne concluded by condemning the journal as "containing propositions which are respectively subversive of the faith, heretical, approaching to heresy, erroneous, derogatory to the teaching of the Church, and offensive to pious ears."[3]
Notwithstanding this severe rebuke Acton continued to persevere.
The suppression of Lord Acton's brilliant but short-lived Home and Foreign Review ilustrates the restraints
