Is it at all surprising that the number of those who hold the opinions of the Church in light esteem should so rapidly increase?  How can that be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?  How can that give confidence in the moral, the spiritual, which has so signally failed in the physical?  It is not possible to dispose of these conflicting facts as “empty shadows,” “vain devices,” “fictions coming from knowledge falsely so called,” “errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth,” as the Church stigmatizes them.  On the contrary, they are stern witnesses, bearing emphatic and unimpeachable testimony against the ecclesiastical claim to infallibility, and fastening a conviction of ignorance and blindness upon her.

Convicted of so many errors, the papacy makes no attempt at explanation.  It ignores the whole matter Nay, more, relying on the efficacy of audacity, though confronted by these facts, it lays claim to infallibility.

Separation of catholicism and civilization.  But, to the pontiff, no other rights can be conceded than those he can establish at the bar of Reason.  He cannot claim infallibility in religious affairs, and decline it in scientific.  Infallibility embraces all things.  It implies omniscience.  If it holds good for theology, it necessarily holds good for science.  How is it possible to coordinate the infallibility of the papacy with the well-known errors into which it has fallen?

Does it not, then, become needful to reject the claim of the papacy to the employment of coercion in the maintenance of its opinions; to repudiate utterly the declaration that “the Inquisition is an urgent necessity in view of the unbelief of the present age,” and in the name of human nature to protest loudly against the ferocity and terrorism of that institution?  Has not conscience inalienable rights?

An impassable and hourly-widening gulf intervenes between Catholicism and the spirit of the age.  Catholicism insists that blind faith is superior to reason; that mysteries are of more importance than facts.  She claims to be the sole interpreter of Nature and revelation, the supreme arbiter of knowledge; she summarily rejects all modern criticism of the Scriptures, and orders the Bible to be accepted in accordance with the views of the theologians of Trent; she openly avows her hatred of free institutions and constitutional systems, and declares that those are in damnable error who regard the reconciliation of the pope with modern civilization as either possible or desirable.