Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an
Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church into a position
from which it can only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges
as those by which it was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by
such a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed out of the old
doctrine regarding the taking of interest for money.
In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta
and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which
the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that
the path has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede
from the old system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate
the main results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never
had a better opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour"
and to drive the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.
In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went
on. In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in
behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by
Theodore Parker at Boston.
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