fficulty in admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it which
recommends it to my mind.

I am defending myself from the charge that I, as a Catholic, not only
make profession to hold doctrines which I cannot possibly believe in my
heart, but that I also believe in a power on earth, which at its own
will imposes upon men any new set of _credenda_, when it pleases, by a
claim to infallibility; and that the necessary effect of such a
condition of mind must be a degrading bondage, or a bitter inward
rebellion relieving itself in secret infidelity, or the necessity of
ignoring the whole subject of religion in a sort of disgust, and of
mechanically saying everything that the Church says. But this is far
from the result; it is far from borne out by the history of the conflict
between infallibility and reason in the past, and the prospect in the
future.

The energy of the human intellect thrives and is joyous, with a tough,
elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely fashioned
weapon. Protestant writers consider that they have all the private
judgment to themselves, and that we have the superincumbent oppression
of authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself,
and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful,
never-dying duel. St. Paul says that his apostolical power is given him
to edification, and not to destruction. There can be no better account
of the infallibility of the Church. Its object is, and its effect also,
not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious
speculation, but resist and control its extravagance.

I will go on in fairness to say what I think _is_ the great trial to the
reason when confronted with that august prerogative of the Catholic
Church. The Church claims, not only to judge infallibly on religious
questions, but to animadvert on opinions in secular matters which bear
upon religion, on matters of philosophy, of science, of literature, of
history, and it demands our submission to her claim. In this province,
taken as a whole, it does not so much speak doctrinally, as enforce
measures of discipline.

I will go on to say further, that, in spite of all the most hostile
critics may urge about these verities of high ecclesiastics in time
past, in the use of their power, I think that the event has shown, after
all, that they were mainly in the right, and that those whom they were
hard upon were mainly in the wrong. There