Pope (by the Vatican Council 1869–70), and an Englishman (Cardinal
Manning) was one of the most active spirits in bringing about this
decree. It would perhaps have caused less alarm if the Pope’s
denunciation of modern errors had not been fresh in men’s memories. At
the end of 1864 he startled the world by issuing a Syllabus “embracing
the principal errors of our age.” Among these were the propositions,
that every man is free to adopt and profess the religion he considers
true, according to the light of reason; that the Church has no right to
employ force; that metaphysics can and ought to be pursued without
reference to divine and ecclesiastical authority; that Catholic states
are right to allow foreign immigrants to exercise their own religion in
public; that the Pope ought to make terms with progress, liberalism, and
modern civilization. The document was taken as a declaration of war
against enlightenment, and the Vatican Council as the first strategic
move of the hosts of darkness. It seemed that the powers of obscurantism
were lifting up their heads with a new menace, and there was an
instinctive feeling that all the forces of reason should be brought into
the field. The history of the last forty years shows that the theory of

[211] Infallibility, since it has become a dogma, is not more harmful
than it was before. But the efforts of the Catholic Church in the years
following the Council to overthrow the French Republic and to rupture
the new German Empire were sufficiently disquieting. Against this was to
be set the destruction of the temporal power of the Popes and the
complete freedom of Italy. This event was the sunrise of Swinburne’s
Songs before Sunrise (which appeared in 1871), a seedplot of atheism and
revolution, sown with implacable hatred of creeds and tyrants. The most
wonderful poem in the volume, the Hymn of Man, was written while the
Vatican Council was sitting. It is a song of triumph over the God of the
priests, stricken by the doom of the Pope’s temporal power. The