The path to this pernicious error is prepared
by that full and unlimited liberty of thought which is spread abroad to
the misfortune of Church and State and which certain persons, with
excessive impudence, venture to represent as an advantage for religion.
Hence comes the corruption of youth, contempt for religion and for the
most venerable laws, and a general mental change in the world--in short
the most deadly scourge of society; since the experience of history has
shown that the States which have shone by their wealth and power and
glory have perished just by this evil-- immoderate freedom of opinion,
licence of conversation, and love of novelties. With this is connected
the liberty of publishing any writing of any kind. This is a deadly and
execrable liberty for which we cannot feel sufficient horror, though
some men dare to acclaim it noisily and enthusiastically." A generation
later Pius IX was to astonish the world by a similar manifesto--his
Syllabus of Modern Errors (1864). Yet, notwithstanding the fundamental
antagonism between the principles of the Church and the drift of modern
civilization, the Papacy survives,
[125] powerful and respected, in a world where the ideas which it
condemned have become the commonplace conditions of life.
The progress of Western nations from the system of unity which prevailed
in the fifteenth, to the system of liberty which was the rule in the
nineteenth century, was slow and painful, illogical and wavering,
generally dictated by political necessities, seldom inspired by
deliberate conviction.
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