One consequence of this relation between the universities and the Church was that “they attained their greatest prosperity as long as the unity of Church and faith remained unimpaired, and that, at the time of the Reformation, they all sided with the Church with the exception of two, Wittenberg and Erfurt. Torn away from their ecclesiastical and established basis only by violent means, they were led to the new doctrine, but really succumbed to it only when their freedom had been curtailed and they had been reduced to state institutions” (_Janssen_, l. c. p. 91). They had been, as the learned _Wimpheling_ wrote at the close of the sixteenth century, “the most favoured daughters of the Church, who tried to repay by fidelity and attachment what they owed to their Mother” (De arte impressoria, apud _Janssen_, l. c. 91). A False Progress. Hence history cannot subscribe to the accusation that the Church is the enemy of progress. How then does it happen that this accusation is made so frequently? The idea suggests itself that there may be here a different meaning given to the word “progress,” that the Church opposes a certain kind of progress which her enemies call “the” progress. And this is the actual fact. If we examine the proofs which are to show the hostile attitude of the Church, we meet at every step _Galileo_, the Copernican system, the Syllabus, and Index. But this appears only on the surface, which hides beneath it something that is easily overlooked by the cursory glance. And this is the precise definition of scientific and civilized progress. Progress has ever been an ideal of powerful attraction. The noblest and best of men have ever displayed the most earnest endeavour onward and upward. In our times, however, this ideal comes forward differently garbed, in the name of the new view of the world, and resolutely censures as reactionary everything that will oppose it. What is this definition? Since the _theory of evolution_ of _Lamarck_ and _Darwin_ entered biology, it has also more and more invaded other branches of science. The principle is now that everywhere, in the organic or inorganic world and in the whole province of human life there is a gradual growth and change—nothing permanent, nothing definite and absolute. Uninterrupted evolution hitherto; hereafter restless development; especially in the greatest good belonging to human life, thought, philosophy, and chiefly religion. Here, too, there are no forms nor dogmas which evolution in its continual development does not evolve and elevate. This idea of evolution is supplemented by subjectivism with its _relativism of truth_: all views, especially philosophical and religious “Truths,” are no longer the reproduction of objectively existing things, but a creation of the subject, of his inner experience and feeling; hence each age must proceed to new thought of _its own_.