progress may give the impression that our period is one in which movement has been all in one direction.  That is far from being true.  One whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has had its gifts for him as well.  The life of mankind is too complex that one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain.  And whatever be one’s standard the facts cannot be ignored.

The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within the Roman Church.  The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert and Ozanam, the title l’Avenir occur to men’s minds at once.  Perhaps there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout, refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the cultivated and the Church.  However, before the Second Empire, an end had been made of that.  It cannot be said that the French Church exactly favoured the infallibility.  It certainly did not stand against the decree as in the old days it would have done.  The decree of infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of reaction in the Roman Church.  That action, theoretically at least, does away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of Trent had not dared earnestly to debate.  Whether the decree of 1870 is viewed in the light of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and again of the Encyclical of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent never wielded against the heresies of his day.  Meantime, so hostile are exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway, that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done everything in its power to prevent.

Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had been felt only in Roman Catholic lands.  A minister of Prussia forbade Kant to speak concerning religion.  The Prussia of Frederick William III. and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna.  The history of the censorship of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the year 1848 is a sad chapter.  The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary.  The universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom.  But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively