Of the various Protestant denominations, several had associated themselves, for the purposes of consultation, under the designation of the Evangelical Alliance.  Their last meeting was held in New York, in the autumn of 1873.  Though, in this meeting, were gathered together many pious representatives of the Reformed Churches, European and American, it had not the prestige nor the authority of the Great Council that had just previously closed its sessions in St. Peters, at Rome.  It could not appeal to an unbroken ancestry of far more than a thousand years; it could not speak with the authority of an equal and, indeed, of a superior to emperors and kings.  While profound intelligence and a statesmanlike, worldly wisdom gleamed in every thing that the Vatican Council had done, the Evangelical Alliance met without a clear and precise view of its objects, without any definitely-marked intentions.  Its wish was to draw into closer union the various Protestant Churches, but it had no well-grounded hope of accomplishing that desirable result.  It illustrated the necessary working, of the principle on which those Churches originated.  They were founded on dissent and exist by separation.

Yet in the action of the Evangelical Alliance may be discerned certain very impressive facts.  It averted its eyes from its ancient antagonist—­that antagonist which had so recently loaded the Reformation with contumely and denunciation—­it fastened them, as the Vatican Council had done, on Science.  Under that dreaded name there stood before it what seemed to be a spectre of uncertain form, of hourly-dilating proportions, of threatening aspect.  Sometimes the Alliance addressed this stupendous apparition in words of courtesy, sometimes in tones of denunciation.

The Vatican constitution criticised. The Alliance failed to perceive that modern Science is the legitimate sister—­indeed, it is the twin-sister—­ of the Reformation.  They were begotten together and were born together.  It failed to perceive that, though there is an impossibility of bringing into coalition the many conflicting sects, they may all find in science a point of connection; and that, not a distrustful attitude toward it, but a cordial union with it, is their true policy.

It remains now to offer some reflections on this “Constitution of the Catholic Faith,” as defined by the Vatican Council.

For objects to present themselves under identical relations to different persons, they must be seen from the same point of view.  In the instance we are now considering, the religious man has his own especial station; the scientific man another, a very different one.  It is not for either to demand that his co-observer shall admit that the panorama of facts spread before them is actually such as it appears to him to be.

The Dogmatic Constitution insists on the admission of this postulate, that the Roman Church acts under a divine commission, specially and exclusively delivered to it.  In virtue of that great authority, it requires of all men the surrender of their intellectual convictions, and of all nations the subordination of their civil power.