* * * * *

There is another deeply interesting question raised by Dr. Newman’s work, on which, if our limits did not absolutely prevent, we should be glad to enter.  We mean the present position of the Church of Rome with that great rationalistic movement with which we, too, are called to contend.  Everywhere in Europe this contest is proceeding, and the relations of the Church of Rome towards it are becoming daily more and more embarrassed.  Mr. Ffoulkes tells us that “the ’Home and Foreign Review’ is the only publication professing to emanate from Roman Catholics in this country that can be named in the same breath with the leading Protestant Reviews."[1] Since he wrote these words its course has been closed by Pontifical authority.  M. Montalembert has barely escaped censure with the payment of the penalty—­so heavy to his co-religionists—­of an enforced silence; and Dr. Newman “interprets recent acts of authority as tying the hands of a controversialist such as I should be,"[2] and so is prevented completing the great work which has occupied so much of his thoughts, and which promised, more than any other work this country is likely to see, to set some limiting boundary line between the provinces of a humble faith in Revelation and an ardent love of advancing science.  This is an evil inflicted by Rome on this whole generation.  But in truth, whenever the mind of Christendom is active, the attitude of the Papal communion before this new enemy is that of a startled, trembling minaciousness, which invites the deadly combat it can so ill maintain.

[1] “Union Review,” ix, 294. [2] “Apol.” 405.

These facts are patent to every one who knows anything whatever of the present state of religious thought throughout Roman Catholic Europe.  Almost every one knows further that the struggle between those who would subject all science and all the actings of the human mind to the authority of the Church, and those who would limit the exercise of that authority more or less to the proper subject-matter of theology, is rife and increasing.  The words of, perhaps, the ablest living member of the Roman Catholic communion have rung through Europe, and many a heart in all religious communions has been saddened by the thought of Dr. Doellinger’s virtual censure.  And yet it is at such a time as this that Dr. Manning ventures to put forth his “Letters to a Friend,” painting all as peace, unanimity, and obedient faith within the Roman Church; all dissension, unbelief, and letting slip of the ancient faith within our own communion.  Surely such are not the weapons by which the cause of God’s truth can be advanced!

But we must bring our remarks on the “Apologia” to a close.