The Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford, Dr. Vaughan, made a
sagacious speech on Thursday, in forming a new Society called "the Academy of Catholic Religion," in which he pointed out
I. that Roman Catholics had always held that revelation was the foundation of education, and that it was very unfair to charge them with taking new ground on the subject, when they only hold to the old ground, and the really new ground is that which is being directly claimed as their own by larger and larger masses of the nation under the name of secular education. He told his audience to "indulge" no such dream as that England is about to become Catholic and to re-enter the unity of the Church. That could only come about, so far as it could come about at all, through the con- tinual recoil from the development of rationalist principles into pure unbelief, —through the recoil f rom Strauss. But till the full re - sults of Rationalism were developed, this reaction could not set in. Is it not, however, making a large admission to say that Roman Catholicism can be perceived even by misguided heretics to be true only as the least intolerable horn of the dilemma, only by contrast with something worse,—total irreligion? Men have shown themselves capable before now of saying, "The dilemma is rigidly logical ; if we don't choose this side of it, we must in common reason choose the other, but as neither has any true spell over us, we will reject both."
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