45 0
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
of all truth; a true religion seeks and recogniscc; truth wherever it can be found, and claims the power of regulating and controlling, not the progress, but the dispensation of knowledge. The Church both accepts the truth and prepares the individual to receive it. The religious world has been long divided upon this great question: Do we find principles in politics and in science? Are their methods so rigorous that we may not bend them, their conclusions so certain that we may not dissemble them, in presence of the more rigorous necessity of the salvation of souls and the more certain truth of the dogmas of faith? This question divides Protestants into rationalists and pietists. The Church solves it in practice, by admitting the truths and the principles in the gross, and by dispensing them in detail as men can bear them. She adlnits the certainty of the mathematical method, and she uses the historical and critical method in estab- lishing the documents of her own revelation and tradition. Deny this method, and her recognised arguments are destroyed. But the Church cannot and will not deny the validity of the methods upon which she is obliged to depend, not indeed for her existence, but for her demon- stration. There is no opening for Catho1ics to deny, in the gross, that political science may have absolute prin- ciples ,?f right, or intellectual science of truth. During the last hundred years Catholic literature has passed through three phases in relation to this question. At one time, when absolutism and infidelity were in the ascendant, and the Church was oppressed by governments and reviled by the people, Catholic writers imitated, and even caricatured the early Christian apologists in en- deavouring to represent their system in the light most acceptable to one side or the other, to disguise antagonism, to modify old claims, and to display only that side of their religion which was likely to attract toleration and good will. Nothing which could give offence was allowed to appear. Something of the fulness, if not of the truth, of religion was sacrificed for the sake of conciliation. The great Catholic revival of the present century gave
