in this line, describes those Catholic writers who refuse to submit to the Congregation of the Index as outlawed; fair subjects for moral assassination.[1] This is very strong; and still, judging from my own small experience, not too strong. In reference to this point I would ask indulgence for a brief personal allusion here. It will serve a twofold object, one of which will be manifest, the other being reserved for possible future reference. Sprung from a source to which the Bible was specially dear, my early training was confined almost exclusively to it. Born in Ireland, I, like my predecessors for many generations, was taught to hold my own against the Church of Rome. I had a father whose memory ought to be to me a stay, and an example of unbending rectitude and purity of life. The small stock to which he belonged were scattered with various fortunes along that eastern rim of Leinster, from Wexford upward, to which they crossed from the Bristol Channel. My father was the poorest of them. Still, in his socially low but mentally and morally independent position, by his own inner energies and affinities, he obtained a knowledge of history which would put mine to shame; while the whole of the controversy between Protestantism and Romanism was at his finger's ends. At the present moment the works and characters which occupied him come, as far-off recollections, to my mind: Claude and Bossuet, Chillingworth and Nott, Tillotson, Jeremy Taylor, Challoner and Milner, Pope and McGuire, and others whom I have forgotten, or whom it is needless to name. Still this man, so charged with the ammunition of controversy, was so respected by his Catholic fellow-townsmen, that they one and all put up their shutters when he died.
With such a preceptor, and with an hereditary interest in the papal controversy, I naturally mastered it. I did not confine myself to the Protestant statement of the question, but made myself also acquainted with the arguments of the Church of Rome. I remember to this hour the interest and surprise with which I read Challoner's "Catholic Christian Instructed," and on the border-line between boyhood and manhood I was to be found taking part in controversies in which the rival faiths were pitted against each other. I sometimes took the Catholic side, and gave my Protestant antagonist considerable trouble. The views of Irish Catholics became thus intimately known to me, and there was no doctrine of Protestantism which they more emphatically rejected, and the ascription of which to them they resented more warmly, than the doctrine of the pope's personal infallibility. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, it was obstinately asserted and reasserted in my presence some time ago, by a Catholic priest, that the doc-
- ↑ See the case of Frohschammer as sketched by a friend in the Preface to "Christenthum und die moderne Wissenschaft." His enemies contrived to take his bread, in great part, away, but they failed to subdue him, and not even the Pope's nuncio could prevent five hundred students of the University of Munich from signing an address to their professor.
