movement has been all in one direction. That is far from being true. One
whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite
to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has
had its gifts for him as well. The life of mankind is too complex that
one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain.
And whatever be one's standard the facts cannot be ignored.

The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within
the Roman Church. The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert
and Ozanam, the title _l'Avenir_ occur to men's minds at once. Perhaps
there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout,
refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the
cultivated and the Church. However, before the Second Empire, an end had
been made of that. It cannot be said that the French Church exactly
favoured the infallibility. It certainly did not stand against the
decree as in the old days it would have done. The decree of
infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of
reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does
away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to
which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which
the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of
Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is
viewed in the light of the _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, and again of
the _Encyclical_ of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the
light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the
Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent
never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are
exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway,
that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in
those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a