SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY, 333 



" discreet Catholics " : even this extraordinary dogma 

 was blindly accepted by the credulous and uneducated 

 masses of the faithful. 



The whole history of the Papacy, as it is sub- 

 stantiated by a thousand reliable sources and accessible 

 documents, appears to the impartial student as an 

 unscrupulous tissue of lying and deceit, a reckless 

 pursuit of absolute mental despotism and secular 

 power, a frivolous contradiction of all the high moral 

 precepts which true Christianity enunciates — charity 

 and toleration, truth and chastity, poverty and self- 

 denial. When we judge the long series of Popes and 

 of the Roman princes of the Church, from whom the 

 Pope is chosen, by the standard of pure Christian 

 morality, it is clear that the great majority of them 

 were pitiful impostors, many of them utterly worth- 

 less and vicious. These well-known historical facts, 

 however, do not prevent millions of educated Catholics 

 from admitting the infallibility which the Pope has 

 claimed for himself ; they do not prevent Protestant 

 princes from going to Rome, and doing reverence to 

 the Pontiff (their most dangerous enemy) ; they do 

 not prevent the fate of the German people from being 

 entrusted to-day to the hands of the servants and 

 followers of this ''pious impostor" in the Reichstag 

 — thanks to the incredible political indolence and 

 credulity of the nation. 



The most interesting of the three great events by 

 which the Papacy has endeavoured to maintain and 

 strengthen its despotism in the nineteenth century is 

 the publication of the encyclica and the syllabus in 

 December, 1864. In these remarkable documents all 

 independent action was forbidden to reason and 

 science, and they were commanded to submit implicitly 



