preserved those principles most faithfully, has offered a steadfast, we
may say a heroic, resistance to the liberal ideas which swept Europe in
the nineteenth century. The guides of her policy grasped thoroughly the
danger which liberal thought meant for an institution which, founded in
a remote past, claimed to be unchangeable and never out of date. Gregory
XVI issued a solemn protest maintaining authority against freedom, the
mediaeval against the modern ideal, in an Encyclical Letter (1832),
which was intended as a rebuke to some young French Catholics (Lamennais
and his friends) who had conceived the promising idea of transforming
the Church by the Liberal spirit

[124] of the day. The Pope denounces “the absurd and erroneous maxim, or
rather insanity, that liberty of conscience should be procured and
guaranteed to every one. 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,