The opinions, tendencies, and
movements, directly or by implication censured, are the effect of
narrow and superficial thinking, of partial and one-sided views,
and are sectarian, sophistical, and hostile to all real progress,
and tend, as far as they go, to throw society back into the
barbarism from which, after centuries of toil and struggle, it is
just beginning to emerge. The Holy Father has condemned nothing
that real philosophy, real science does not also condemn;
nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the American system
itself. For the mass of the people, it were desirable that
fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are
not, in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were
expected by the Holy Father to be given by the bishops and
prelates, to whom, not to the people, save through them, the
Encyclical was addressed. Little is to be hoped, and much is to
be feared, for liberty, science, and civilization from European
Liberalism, which has no real affinity with American territorial
democracy and real civil and religious freedom. But God and
reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the New, and
it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission,
and realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom
nothing is hidden.
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