ke louder
claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent
Christian men of our day, men whose crime was that they were intelligent
enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to
acknowledge it.

Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for excluding
knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic universities
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while real knowledge
of geological and biological and anthropological truth is denied
or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and
universities in the nineteenth century.

Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the Catholic
Index, and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every really important
book in the last three centuries has been forbidden by it, so long as
young men in so many American Protestant universities and colleges are
nursed with "ecclesiastical pap" rather than with real thought, and
directed to the works of "solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry
"approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept aloof from
such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper, and
Lecky.

It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that some of the former
strongholds of her bigotry have become liberalized; but, on the other
hand, Catholicism can point to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, now
happily reigning, has made a noble change as regards open dealing with
documents. The days of Monsignor Marini, it may be hoped, are gone. The
Vatican Library, with its masses of historical material, has been thrown
open to Protestant and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has
been freely used by men representing all shades of religious thought.

As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault,
Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault of religion; it
was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological dogmas to
scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the
Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever
prone to substitute for religion. Justly is it said by one of the most
eminent among contemporary Anglican divines, that "it is because they
have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so
often been foes of light."(87)

(87) For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic
historian of genius, as to the POPULAR demand