494
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
the spirit of an austere immorality. The ideas embodied in the ROlnan Inquisition became characteristic of a system which obeyed expediency by submitting to in- definite modification, but underwent no change of principle. Three centuries have so changed the \vorld that the maxims with which the Church resisted the Reformation have become her weakness and her reproach, and that which arrested her decline now arrests her progress. To break effectually with that tradition and eradicate its influence, nothing less is required than an authority equal to that by which it was imposed. The Vatican Council was the first sufficient occasion which Catholicism had enjoyed to reform, remodel, and adapt the work of Trent. This idea was present among the Inotives which caused it to be summoned. I twas apparent that two systems which cannot be reconciled were about to contend at the Council; but the extent and force of the reforming spirit were unknown. Seventeen questions submitted by the Holy See to the bishops in 1867 concerned matters of discipline, the regulation of marriage and education, the policy of encouraging new monastic orders, and the means of making the parochial clergy more dependent on the bishops. They gave no indication of the deeper motives of the time. In the midst of many trivial proposals, the leading objects of reform grew more defined as the time approached, and men became conscious of distinct pur- poses based on a consistent notion of the Church. They received systematic expression from a Bohemian priest, whose work, The Refor1n of the Church in its Head and Mel1zbers, is founded on practical experience, not only on literary theory, and is the most important manifesto of these ideas. The author exhorts the Council to restrict centralisation, to reduce the office of the Holy See to the ancient litnits of its primacy, to restore to the Episcopate the prerogatives which have been confiscated by Rome, to abolish the temporal government, which is the prop of hierarchical despotism, to revise the matrinlonial discipline, to suppress many religious orders and the solemn vows
