So almost everything that has made the education, the political, the
industrial, the social growth of the world, this infallibility idea has
stood square in the way of, and done its best to hinder. Take, for
example, an illustration. When chloroform was discovered, the Church in
Scotland opposed its use in cases of childbirth, because it said it was
a wicked interference with the judgment God pronounced on Eve after the
fall.

So, in almost every direction, whatever has been for the benefit of the
world has been opposed in the interests of old-time ideas, until the
whole thing culminated at last in this: Here is this nineteenth century
of ours, which has done more for the advancement of man than the
preceding fifteen centuries all put together. Political liberty,
religious liberty, universal education, the enfranchisement and
elevation of women, the abolition of slavery, temperance, almost
everything has been achieved, until the world, the face of it, has been
transformed. And yet Pope Pius IX., in an encyclical which he issued a
little while before his death, pronounced, ex-cathedra and infallibly,
the opinion that this whole modern society was godless. And yet, as I
said, this godless modern world has done more for man and for the glory
of God than the fifteen hundred years of church dominance that preceded
it.

For the sake of man, then, that intellectually, politically, socially,
industrially, every other way, he may be free to grow, to expand, to
adopt all the new ideas that promise higher help, hope, and freedom,
for the sake of man, we refuse to be bound by the inherited and fixed
opinions of the past.

Now two or three points I wish to speak of briefly, as I near the