bility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of
reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does
away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to
which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which
the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of
Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is
viewed in the light of the _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, and again of
the _Encyclical_ of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the
light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the
Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent
never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are
exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway,
that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in
those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a
religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done
everything in its power to prevent.

Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had
been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade
Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III.
and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich
had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship
of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the
year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church
in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The
universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom.
But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which
staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained,
was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety
and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church
the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the
theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have
held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are
functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring
about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution,
it must be owned, we wait.

The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for
reaction as obtained in Fra