We sometimes hear it said that this intolerance takes from Catholics
the right to think. This is true in the same sense that penitentiaries,
or the dread of them, deprive citizens of the right to act. Everybody,
outside of sleeping hours and with his thinking machine in good order,
thinks. Perhaps if there were a little more of it, there would be more
solid convictions and more practical faith. Holy Writ has it somewhere
that the whole world is given over to vice and sin because there is no
one who thinks.

But you have not and never had the right to think as you please, inside
or outside the Church. This means the right to form false judgments, to
draw conclusions contrary to fact. This is not a right, it is a defect,
a disease. Thus to act is not the normal function of the brain. It is
no more the nature of the mind to generate falsehoods than it is the
nature of a sewing machine to cut hair. Both were made for different
things. He therefore who disobeys the law that governs his mind
prostitutes that faculty to error.

But suppose, being a Catholic, I cannot see things in that true light,
what then? In such a case, either you persist, in the matter of your
faith, in being guided by the smoky lamp of your reason alone, or you
will be guided by the authority of God's appointed Church. In the first
alternative, your place is not in the Church, for you exclude yourself
by not living up to the conditions of her membership. You cannot deny
but that she has the right to determine those conditions.

If you choose the latter, then correct yourself. It is human to err,
but it is stupidity to persist in error and refuse to be enlightened.
If you cannot see for yourself, common sense demands that you get