But, without going any further into detail, we may say generally the age asserts the complete emancipation of man and his institutions from all intellectual, moral, and spiritual control or restraint, and under the name of liberty asserts the complete and absolute independence of man both individually and collectively, and under pretence of democratic freedom wars against all authority and all government, whether political or ecclesiastical. It does not like to concede even the axioms of the mathematician or the definitions of the geometrician, and sees in them a certain limitation of intellectual freedom. To ask it to conform to fixed and invariable principles, or to insist that there are principles independent of the human mind, or to maintain that truth is independent of opinion, and that opinions are true or false as they do or do not conform to it, is to seek to trammel free and independent thought, and to outrage what is most sacred and divine in man. The mind must be free, and to be free it must be free from all obligation to seek, to recognize, or to conform to truth. Indeed, there is no truth but what the mind conceives to be such, and the mind is free to abide by its own conceptions, for they are the truth for it. Rome, in asserting that truth is independent of the human will, human passions and conceptions, one and universal, and always and everywhere the same, and in condemning as error whatever denies it or does not conform to it, is a spiritual despotism, which every just and noble principle of human nature, the irrepressible instincts of humanity itself, wars against, and resists by every means in its power.