LOISY, ALFRED FIRMIN (1857- ), French Catholic theologian, was born at Ambrières in French Lorraine of parents who, descended from a long line of resident peasantry, tilled there the soil themselves. The physically delicate boy was put into the ecclesiastical school of St Dizier, without any intention of a clerical career; but he decided for the priesthood, and in 1874 entered the Grand Seminaire of Chalons-sur-Marne. Mgr Meignan, then bishop of Chalons, afterwards cardinal and archbishop of Tours, ordained him priest in 1879. After being _curé_ successively of two villages in that diocese, Loisy went in May 1881, to study and take a theological degree, to the Institut Catholique in Paris. Here he was influenced, as to biblical languages and textual criticism, by the learned and loyal-minded Abbé Paulin Martin, and as to a vivid consciousness of the true nature, gravity and urgency of the biblical problems and an Attic sense of form by the historical intuition and the mordant irony of Abbé Louis Duchesne. At the governmental institutions, Professors Oppert and Halévy helped further to train him. He took his theological degree in March 1890, by the oral defence of forty Latin scholastic theses and by a French dissertation, _Histoire du canon de l'ancien testament_, published as his first book in that year. Professor now at the Institut Catholique, he published successively his lectures: _Histoire du canon du N.T._ (1891); _Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible_ (1892); and _Les Évangiles synoptiques_ (1893, 1894). The two latter works appeared successively in the bi-monthly _L'Enseignement biblique_, a periodical written throughout and published by himself. But already, on the occasion of the death of Ernest Renan, October 1892, the attempts made to clear up the main principles and results of biblical science, first by Mgr d'Hulst, rector of the Institut Catholique, in his article "La Question biblique" (_Le Correspondant_, Jan. 25th, 1893), and then by Loisy himself, in his paper "La Question biblique et l'inspiration des Écritures" (_L'Enseignement biblique_, Nov.-Dec. 1893), promptly led to serious trouble. The latter article was immediately followed by Loisy's dismissal, without further explanation, from the Institut Catholique. And a few days later Pope Leo XIII. published his encyclical _Providentissimus Deus_, which indeed directly condemned not Abbé Loisy's but Mgr d'Hulst's position, yet rendered the continued publication of consistently critical work so difficult that Loisy himself suppressed his _Enseignement_ at the end of 1893. Five further instalments of his _Synoptiques_ were published after this, bringing the work down to the Confession of Peter inclusively.