This is specially the case with great ideas.  You may stifle them; or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred.  But you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much, wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when abused.

But that has never been the principle of his Church.  At least, the liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty.  It has been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as to other ideas, not so congenial, “great” ones and little ones too, the lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which took alarm even at remote danger.  And those whose pride it is that they are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially when it coincides with what they wish and like.

But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance.  They stoutly and boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official contradiction meets them.  There may be a disapproving opinion in their own body, but it does not show itself.  The disclaimer of even such a man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified.  They are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it be an adverse one.  They have the power to make themselves the most prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its future form.  Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr. Newman’s “chief authors,” but to the world outside most of these will be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most strongly about the Pope’s infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has this to say for itself.  Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in England shelters and sanctions it.  Nothing can be more clearly and forcibly stated than the following assertions of the unimpeachable claim of “dominant opinions” in the Roman Catholic system by the highest Roman Catholic authority in England.  “It is an ill-advised overture of peace,” writes Archbishop Manning,