Ever, therefore, consistent with herself, if on the one hand she rejects immoderate liberty, which both in the case of individuals and peoples results in license or in servitude; on the other she willingly and with pleasure embraces those happier circumstances which the age brings; if they truly contain the prosperity of this life, which is as it were a stage in the journey to that other which is to endure everlastingly. Therefore what they say that the Church is jealous of, the more modern political systems repudiate in a mass, and whatever the disposition of these times has brought forth, is an inane and contemptible calumny. The madness of opinion it indeed repudiates; it reproves the wicked plans of sedition, and especially that habit of mind in which the beginnings of a voluntary departing from God are visible; but since every true thing must necessarily proceed from God, whatever of truth is by search attained, the Church acknowledges as a certain token of the Divine mind. And since there is in the world nothing which can take away belief in the doctrines divinely handed down and many things which confirm this, and since every finding of truth may impel man to the knowledge or praise of God Himself, therefore whatever may happen to extend the range of knowledge, the Church will always willingly and joyfully accept; and she will, as is her wont in the case of other departments of knowledge, studiously encourage and promote those also which are concerned with the investigation of nature. In which studies, if the mind finds anything new, the Church is not in opposition; she fights not against the search after more things for the grace and convenience of life--nay, a very foe to inertness and sloth, she earnestly wishes that the talents of men should, by being cultivated and exercised, bear still richer fruits; she affords incitements to every sort of art and craft, and by her own virtue directing by her own perfection all the pursuits of those things to virtue and salvation, she strives to prevent man from turning aside his intelligence and industry from God and heavenly things.