APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS 227 



The memorialists point with bitterness to the fact, that 

 "the name of no Irish Catholic is known in connection 

 with the physical and natural sciences." But this, they 

 ought to know, is the complaint of free and cultivated 

 minds wherever a Priesthood exercises dominant power. 

 Precisely the same complaint has been made with respect 

 to the Catholics of Germany. The great national litera- 

 ture and the scientific achievements of that country, in 

 modern times, are almost wholly the work of Protestants. 

 A vanishingly small fraction of it only is derived from 

 members of the Eoman Church, although the number of 

 these in Germany is at least as great as that of the Prot- 

 estants. "The question arises," says a writer in an able 

 German periodical, "what is the cause of a phenomenon 

 so humiliating to the Catholics? It cannot be referred 

 to want of natural endowment due to climate (for the Prot- 

 estants of Southern Germany have contributed powerfully 

 to the creations of the German intellect), but purely to 

 outward circumstances. And these are readily discovered 

 in the pressure exercised for centuries by the Jesuitical 

 system, which has crushed out of Catholics every tendency 

 to free mental productiveness." It is, indeed, in Catholic 

 countries that the weight of Ultramontanism 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, however, was more apparent than real, 

 and Hermes, Hirscher, and Giinther, though individually 

 broken and subdued, prepared the way, in Bavaria, for 

 the persecuted but unflinching Frohschammer, for Dol- 

 linger, and for the remarkable liberal movement of which 

 Dollinger is the head and guide. 



