“Long as of life the joyous hours remain, Let on this head unfading flowers reside, There bloom the vernal rose’s earliest pride; And when, our flames commissioned to destroy, Age step ’twixt Love and me, and intercept the joy; When my changed these locks no more shall know, And all its petty honors turn to snow; Then let me rightly spell of Nature’s ways; To Providence, to him my thoughts I’d raise, And love as he throughout remaining days.” —_Gray._ We should cherish a kind feeling for all our fellows, and in doing this we should not forget our duty to point them to truth in word and example, to be ever faithful to truth. There are two great fields of thought for the exercise of the Christian intellect of the present times. One is the corruptions of Roman Catholic religion, and the other is the corruptions of Protestant religions. That both are great feeder-dams to infidelity and skepticism is demonstrated by the infidel productions of the day. The dogma of ecclesiastic authority set up in opposition to reason and scientific discovery is the _infidel’s devil_, and a very poor devil at that. For, when the Pope has interfered to settle a question it has often happened that his decisions were wrong. On March 5, 1616, the congregation of the Index published a decree condemning as “false, unscriptural and destructive of Catholic truth,” the opinion that the earth moves round the sun. It is denied by Roman theologians that Paul IV., who set the Index at work and agreed with its decisions, was responsible for this decree, but the preponderance of evidence is against them. It is known that this Pope presided in a congregation of the Inquisition on February 25, 1616, in which, after this same opinion, that the sun is the center of our universe, had been described as “absurd, philosophically false and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to holy scripture;” and the opinion that the earth is not the center of the universe, but moves, and that daily, “absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith;” Cardinal Bellamine was appointed to visit Galileo, the astronomer, and order him to give up these false opinions under pain of imprisonment for refusal. It was thus that the congregation of the Index took action and published its decree a week later.