Now, we are not the enemies of freedom. The Catholic Church is not the enemy of freedom. But we should expect that one who comes forward to enlighten the world on this important subject, would tell us _how far_ human reason is to be left without restraint in the search after truth. It is easy to talk of intolerance, persecution, narrow-minded bigotry; but these words have no meaning unless we first clearly understand what that freedom is—in thought, in word, in action—which is the natural right of all men; which it is intolerance to deny, which it is tyranny to extinguish. First of all, if the fact of a Divine Revelation be once admitted, it is clear that human reason is not exempt from _all restraint_: it must be controlled at least by the Word of God. We are surely bound to believe what God has taught: and when reason would lead us to conclusions contrary to His teaching, as may sometimes happen, we are bound to check our reason and to abandon those conclusions. For, reason _may_ be deceived, but God can _not_. This is what we understand by the words of St. Paul when he speaks of “bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ”—II. _Cor._, x. 5. With this preliminary remark we shall now submit to our readers the opinions of Mr. Justice Keogh:— “Could words of mine prevail to induce you to devote a small portion of your leisure hours, stolen though it be from the pleasure paths of sensational or periodical literature, to those great productions of John Milton, in which the staunchest friend of freedom and of truth that ever lived has made the most successful war against tyranny and falsehood—in which he has proclaimed in tones not unworthy of the Apostle of the Gentiles,(2) that education really free is the only source of political and individual liberty, the only true safeguard of states and bulwark of their renown—in which he has for ever ‘justified the ways of God to man’, by asserting the right of all men to exercise unrestrained their intellectual faculties upon all the gifts of God—to determine for themselves what is truth and what is falsehood—to circulate their thoughts from one to another, from land to land, from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, free as ‘the winds that from four quarters blow’—to raise their thoughts and to pour forth their words above the level of vulgar superstition, unrestricted by any illiberal or illiterate licenser—then you will find that he has risen, as mortal man never did before, to the height of greatest argument, and proclaimed in language which is affecting the fate of millions, even at this hour, on the banks of the Mississippi, and in the remote forests of the far west, that He who has made ’of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, willeth not that men shall any longer hold in bondage as a property the bodies or the