Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly in accordance with principles held at that time by all religionists, Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world; these later persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles which all Protestants to-day hold or pretend to hold, and none make louder claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent Christian men of our day, men whose crime was that they were intelligent enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to acknowledge it.
Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while real knowledge of geological and biological and anthropological truth is denied or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and universities in the nineteenth century.
Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to the Catholic Index, and to lay stress on the fact that nearly every really important book in the last three centuries has been forbidden by it, so long as young men in so many American Protestant universities and colleges are nursed with "ecclesiastical pap" rather than with real thought, and directed to the works of "solemnly constituted impostors," or to sundry "approved courses of reading," while they are studiously kept aloof from such leaders in modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper, and Lecky.
It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that some of the former strongholds of her bigotry have become liberalized; but, on the other hand, Catholicism can point to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, now happily reigning, has made a noble change as regards open dealing with documents.

The days of Monsignor Marini, it may be hoped, are gone.

The Vatican Library, with its masses of historical material, has been thrown open to Protestant and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has been freely used by men representing all shades of religious thought.
As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at fault, Protestant as well as Catholic.

It was not the fault of religion; it was the fault of that short-sighted linking of theological dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter defiance of the words and works of the Blessed Founder of Christianity, narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever prone to substitute for religion.

Justly is it said by one of the most eminent among contemporary Anglican divines, that "it is because they have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so often been foes of light."(87) (87) For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic historian of genius, as to the POPULAR demand for persecution and the pressure of the lower strata in ecclesiastical organizations for cruel measures, see Balmes's Le Protestantisme compare au Catholicisme, etc., fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol.ii.Archbishop Spaulding has something of the same sort in his Miscellanies.