The infallible dogmas of the Holy Roman Church have always attracted so much attention that the world as a whole has remained in ignorance of the vast terrain on which the Church not only permits but encourages what we may call agnosticism. Just as she has been uncompromising in maintaining the revelation entrusted to her and the definitions she has once reached, so she has always insisted that there are immense tracts of investigation with which she has no direct concern, and which she leaves to the human intellect; regions regarding which she has no enlightenment to convey and which in many cases are beyond the reach of reason.

Take, for example, her attitude towards Science as defined in that same Council of 1870 which defined the Infallibility of the Pope. She leaves ‘to each of the Sciences to make use of its own principles and its own method in its own sphere.’ She wishes to preserve them from error, certainly, by warning them that, if in conflict with the truth, there must be some mistake : and she wishes also to prevent their encroaching magisterially on the realm of faith. But she does not dictate the movements of the stars to the astronomers, nor the composition of substances to the chemists. She urges rather that the rightly-ordered reason not only produces fruit of itself, but leads on to a truth better than its own.’ So far, therefore, is the Church from opposing the cultivation of the human arts and sciences, that she in many ways helps and promotes it;