Yet he was
never able to break away from the idea it embodied. At times, in
face of the difficulties which beset the orthodox theory, he
ventured to favour some slight concessions. Toward the end of his
life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the species of one
genus constituted at the creation one species; and from the last
edition of his _Systema Naturae_ he quietly left out the strongly
orthodox statement of the fixity of each species, which he had
insisted upon in his earlier works. But he made no adequate
declaration. What he might expect if he openly and decidedly
sanctioned a newer view he learned to his cost; warnings came
speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant sides.
At a time when eminent prelates of the older Church were eulogizing
debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the unspeakably obscene
casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the education of the priesthood
as to the relations of men to women, the modesty of the Church
authorities was so shocked by Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system
in plants that for many years his writings were prohibited in the
Papal States and in various other parts of Europe where clerical
authority was strong enough to resist the new scientific current.
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