CONFLICTS WITH ROl\lE
471
with any manner of error: and the conscience can only be injured by such arts, which, in reality, give a far more formidable measure of the influence of the human element in ecclesiastical government than any collection of de- tached cases of scandal can do. , For these arts are simply those of all human governments which possess legislative power, fear attack, deny responsibility, and therefore shrink from scrutiny. One of the great instruments for preventing historical scrutiny had long been the Index of prohibited books, which \vas accordingly directed, not against falsehood only, but particularly against certain departments of truth. Through it an effort had been made to keep the kno\vledge of ecclesiastical history from the faithful, and to give currency to a fabulous and fictitious picture of the progress and action of the Church. The means \vould have been found quite inadequate to the end, if it had not been for the fact that while society was absorbed by controversy, kno\vledge was only valued so far as it served a contro- versial purpose. Every party in those days virtually had its own prohibitive I ndex, to brand all inconvenient truths \vith the note of falsehood. No party cared for knowledge that could not be made available for argument. Neutral and ambiguous science had no attractions for men engaged in perpetual combat. Its spirit first won the naturalists, the mathematicians, and the philologists; then it vivified the other\vise aimless erudition of the Benedictines; and at last it was carried into history, to give new life to those sciences which deal with the tradition, the law, and the action of the Church. The home of this transformation was in the universities of Germany, for there the Catholic teacher \vas placed in circumstances altogether novel. He had to address men who had every opportunity of becoming familiar with the arguments of the enemies of the Church, and with the discoveries and concl usions of those whose studies were without the bias of any religious object. \Vhilst he lectured in one room, the next might be occupied by a pantheist, a rationalist, or a Lutheran, descanting on the
