TYNDALUS REPLY TO HIS CRITICS. 435 



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 two- 

 fold 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 un- 

 bending rectitude and purity of life. The small stock to which he be- 

 longed were scattered with various fortunes along that eastern rim of 

 Leinster, from Wexford upward, to which they crossed from the Bris- 

 tol 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 Prot- 

 estantism and Romanism was at his finger's ends. At the present mo- 

 ment 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 Mc- 

 Guire, 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- 



1 See the case of Frohschammer as sketched by a friend in the Preface to " Christen- 

 thura und die moderne Wisseuschaft." 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 pre- 

 vent five hundred students of the University of Munich from signing an address to their 

 professor. 



