enlightenment of the ignorant majority, and so delay the enlightenment of the head. Worse still, such silence, if widespread, must disable the Church from meeting the needs of modern thought, and from coping with, still more from guiding, the educated world. Wherever the system of secrecy and accommodation is rendered impossible, by the competition of knowledge in which the most thorough exposition of the truth is sure of the victory, there such methods as those advocated in the Brief, or practised in submission to its dictation, must be fatal to the Church's wider influence. We may reverence the individual self-suppression, but nothing can be more profoundly discouraging than the fatal conflict of authority with historic truth. Even Lord Acton's faith could only hope that authority might ultimately acknowledge the principles upon whose suppression it was for the present actively engaged. Thus the Church, in his view, was committed to a fruitless conflict with truths to which it must at last surrender. It was destined evermore to oppose all truth for which the ignorance of the majority precluded recognition; to silence its prophets and hereafter adorn their sepulchres; to denounce as injurious what it would one day embrace as true; if, indeed, the slowly increasing enlightenment of the general body of the devout shall ultimately remove the prejudices of the head. Certainly the prospect was scarcely one to cheer. It shows impressively the tremendous strain which the encroachment of authority over the province of opinion placed upon the faith of its noblest sons.
Bishop Ullathorne viewed the successive collapse of Acton's journals with a natural satisfaction.
