Furthermore, the demand to follow always “the ideas of the period” suggests the question: Who is to represent the period? Who represented Greece, the sophists or _Plato_? Who was representative of the first days of Christianity, the Roman emperors or the martyrs? Will not the passage in _Goethe’s_ Faust apply in most cases: “What they call the spirit of the times is but their own mind wherein the times are reflected”? True, if progress is taken to be the overstepping by human reason of the eternal standards of immutable truth and the barriers of faith, if it is to be the attempt at emancipation from God and religion, then there is no more resolute foe of progress than the Christian religion, than the Catholic Church. But this is not progress but loss of the truth, not higher religion but apostasy, not development of what is best in man, but retrogression to mental disintegration by scepticism. The Syllabus. In the eyes of many it is especially the Syllabus of _Pius IX._ by which the Catholic Church has erected a lasting monument to its enmity to civilization. It is the Syllabus, we are told, in which _Pius IX._ has “ex cathedra condemned the freedom of science” (_W. Kahl_, Bekenntnissgebundenheit und Lehrfreiheit, 1897, 10); “in which modern culture and science is being cursed” (_Th. Fuchs_, Neue Freie Presse, Nov. 25, 1907); in which “the most general foundations of our political order, the freedom of conscience, are rejected” (_G. Kaufmann_, Die Lehrfreiheit an den deutschen Universitaeten, 1898, 34); “in which it has simply anathematized the achievements of the modern concept of right” (_F. Jodl_, Gedanken über Reformkatholizismus, 1902, 5); the Syllabus “strikes blows against the autonomy of human development of culture, it is a _non possumus_, I cannot make peace, I cannot compromise with what is termed progress, liberalism, and civilization.” The Syllabus is a favorite stock argument of professional free-thinkers and agitators, and the one with which they like to open the discussion. For this reason we must say a few words about it.