the Protestants.
'The question arises,' says a writer in an able German periodical,
'what is the cause of a phenomenon so humiliating to the Catholics? It
cannot be referred to want of natural endowment due to climate (for
the Protestants of Southern Germany have contributed powerfully to the
creations of the German intellect), but purely to outward
circumstances. And these are readily discovered in the pressure
exercised for centuries by the Jesuitical system, which has crushed
out of Catholics every tendency to free mental productiveness.' It is,
indeed, in Catholic countries that the weight of Ultramontanism has
been most severely felt. It is in such countries that the very finest
spirits, who have dared, without quitting their faith, to plead for
freedom or reform, have suffered extinction. The extinction, however,
was more apparent than real, and Hermes, Hirscher, and Gunther, though
individually broken and subdued, prepared the way, in Bavaria, for the
persecuted but unflinching Frohschammer, for Doellinger, and for the
remarkable liberal movement of which Doellinger is the head and guide.

Though moulded for centuries to an obedience unparalleled in any other
country, except Spain, the Irish intellect is beginning to show signs
of independence; demanding a diet more suited to its years than the
pabulum of the Middle Ages. As for the recent manifesto in which
Pope, Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops are united in one grand
anathema, its character and fate are shadowed forth by the Vision of
Nebuchadnezzar recorded in the Book of Daniel. It resembles the
image, whose form was terrible, but the gold, and silver, and brass,
and iron of which rested upon feet of clay. And a stone smote the
feet of clay; and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the
gold, were broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the
summer threshing-floors, and the wind carried them away.

Monsignor Capel has recently been good enough to proclaim at once the
friendliness of his Church towards true science, and her right to
determine what true science is. Let us dwell for a moment on the
proofs of her scientific competence. When Halley's comet appeared in
1456 it was regarded as the harbinger of God's vengeance, the
dispenser of war, pestilence, and famine, and by order of the Pope the
church bells of Europe were rung to scare the monster away. An
additional daily prayer was added to the supplications of the
faithfu