nces which were
believed to have brought about the Revolution, to sensationalism in
metaphysics, to atheism in what should have been theology, to the notion
of sovereignty of peoples in politics, inevitably sought a
rallying-point in a renewed allegiance to that prodigious spiritual
system which had fostered the germs of order and social feeling in
Europe, and whose name remains even now in the days of its ruin, as the
most permanent symbol and exemplar of stable organisation. Another
reason for English indifference to this movement is the rapidity with
which here, as elsewhere, dust gathers thickly round the memory of the
champions of lost causes. Some of the most excellent of human
characteristics--intensity of belief, for example, and a fervid anxiety
to realise aspirations--unite with some of the least excellent of them,
to make us too habitually forget that, as Mill has said, the best
adherents of a fallen standard in philosophy, in religion, in politics,
are usually next in all good qualities of understanding and sentiment to
the best of those who lead the van of the force that triumphs. Men are
not so anxious as they should be, considering the infinite diversity of
effort that goes to the advancement of mankind, to pick up the
fragments of truth and positive contribution, that so nothing be lost,
and as a consequence the writings of antagonists with whom we are
believed to have nothing in common, lie unexamined and disregarded.

In the case of the group of writers who, after a century of criticism,
ventured once more with an intrepid confidence--differing fundamentally
from the tone of preceding apologists in the Protestant camp, who were
nearly as critical as the men they refuted--to vindicate not the bare
outlines of Christian faith, but the entire scheme, in its extreme
manifestation, of the most ancient and severely maligned of all
Christian organisations, this apathy is very much to be regretted on
several grounds. In the first place, it is impossible to see
intelligently to the bottom of the momentous spirit of ultramontanism,
which is so deep a difficulty of continental Europe, and which, touching
us in Ireland, is perhaps already one of our own deepest difficulties,
without comprehending in its best shape the theory on which
ultramontanism rests. And this theory it is impossible to seize
thoroughly, without some knowledge of the ideas of its most efficient
defenders in its earlier years. Secondly, it is a