ere nevertheless opposed to
intellectual liberty. The answer came immediately, that there have in
every age been men deservedly respected for these virtues who did all in
their power to repress the free action of the intellect. What is called
the Ultramontane party in the present day includes great numbers of
talented adherents who are most industrious, most persevering, who
willingly submit to the severest discipline--who are learned,
self-denying, and humble enough to accept the most obscure and
ill-requited duties. Some of these men possess nine-tenths of the
qualifications that are necessary to the highest intellectual life--they
have brilliant gifts of nature; they are well-educated; they take a
delight in the exercise of noble faculties, and yet instead of employing
their time and talents to help the intellectual advancement of mankind,
they do all in their power to retard it. They have many most respectable
virtues, but one is wanting. They have industry, perseverance,
discipline, but they have _not_ disinterestedness.

I do not mean disinterestedness in its ordinary sense as the absence of
selfish care about money. The Church of Rome has thousands of devoted
servants who are content to labor in her cause for stipends so miserable
that it is clear they have no selfish aim; whilst they abandon all those
possibilities of fortune which exist for every active and enterprising
layman. But their thinking can never be disinterested so long as their
ruling motive is devotion to the interests of their Church. Some of them
are personally known to me, and we have discussed together many of the
greatest questions which agitate the continental nations at the present
time. They have plenty of intellectual acumen; but whenever the
discussion touches, however remotely, the ecclesiastical interests that
are dear to them, they cease to be observers--they become passionate
advocates. It is this habit of advocacy which debars them from all
elevated speculation about the future of the human race, and which so
often induces them to take a side with incapable and retrograde
governments, too willingly overlooking their deficiencies in the
expectation of services to the cause. Their predecessors have impeded,
as far as they were able, the early growth of science--not for
intellectual reasons, but because they instinctively felt that there was
something in the scientific spirit not favorable to those interests
which they placed far above