The episode offers a very striking exhibition of the entire change of front of Rome with regard to ‘the rights of reason.’ There are many other official utterances in the same sense. An important provincial council, held at Cologne in 1860, and fully authorised, discussed the question at length. ‘We have no faith,’ it enacted, ‘until we have seen with our reason that God is worthy of credence and that He has spoken to us’; and again, ‘The firmness of faith ... requires that he who believes must have a preliminary _rational certitude_ of the existence of God and the fact of a revelation having come from Him, and he must have no prudent doubt on the matter.’ In the Encyclical of 1846 even Pius IX. insisted on the same principle: ‘Human reason, to avoid the danger of deception and error, must diligently search out the fact of a divine revelation, and must attain a _certainty_ that the message comes from God, so that, as the Apostle most wisely ordains, it may offer Him a “reasonable service.”’ The Vatican Council of 1870 was equally explicit. The modern Catholic theologian, in his treatise on faith, invariably defines it as an intellectual act, an acceptance of truths after a satisfactory rational inquiry into the authority that urges them. It is official Catholic teaching that faith is impossible without a previous rational certitude. Moreover, the theologian admits that every part and particle of the dogmatic system must meet the criticism of reason. In the positive sense it is indispensable that reason prove the existence of God, the authority of God, and the divinity of the Scriptures. In the negative sense, no single dogma must contain an assertion which is clearly opposed to a proved fact or to a clear pronouncement of human reason or the human conscience. These are not the speculations of advanced theologians, but the current teaching in the Roman schools and manuals[38] of dogmatic theology. [38] One of the most widely-used of these manuals at present is that of the learned Jesuit, Father Hurter. On p. 472 of the first volume one finds the Bernardist notions of faith sternly rejected, and variously attributed to ‘Protestants,’ ‘Pietists,’ and ‘Kantists.’ Thus has history vindicated the heretic. The multiplication of churches has made the Bernardist notion of faith wholly untenable and unserviceable to Rome. Reason precedes faith; reason must lead men to faith, and make faith acceptable to men. That is the gospel that now falls on the dead ear of the great master.