214 FEAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



outward circumstances. And these are readily discov- 

 ered in the pressure exercised for centuries by the Jesu- 

 itical system, which has crushed out of Catholics 

 every tendency to free mental productiveness.' It is, 

 indeed, in Catholic countries that the weight of Ultra- 

 montanism has been most severely felt. It is in such 

 countries that the very finest spirits, who have dared, 

 without quitting their faith, to plead for freedom or 

 reform, have suffered extinction. The extinction, how- 

 ever, was more apparent than real, and Hermes, Hirs- 

 cher, and Gunther, though individually broken and 

 subdued, prepared the way, in Bavaria, for the perse- 

 cuted but unflinching Frohschammer, for Dollinger, 

 and for the remarkable liberal movement of which 

 Dollinger is the head and guide. 



Though moulded for centuries to an obedience un- 

 paralleled in any other country, except Spain, the Irish 

 intellect is beginning to show signs of independence; 

 demanding a diet more suited to its years than the 

 pabulum of the Middle Ages. As for the recent mani- 

 festo in which Pope, Cardinal, Archbishops, and 

 Bishops are united in one grand anathema, its char- 

 acter and fate are shadowed forth by the Vision of 

 Nebuchadnezzar recorded in the Book of Daniel. It 

 resembles the image, whose form was terrible, but the 

 gold, and silver, and brass, and iron of which rested 

 upon feet of clay. And a stone smote the feet of clay; 

 and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the 

 gold, were broken in pieces together, and became like 

 the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, and the wind 

 carried them away. 



Monsignor Capel has recently been good enough to 

 proclaim at once the friendliness of his Church towards 

 true science, and her right to determine what true 

 science is. Let us dwell for a moment on the proofs 



