The only men in the eighteenth century who really to some extent penetrated into the fundamental thought of Vico and proclaimed though unwillingly his genuine greatness were--and this is another proof of the solid mental fibre of Catholicism--his Catholic opponents, of whom there were plenty: Romano, Lami, Rogadei, and above all Finetti. They saw that in spite of his stubborn protestations of religious orthodoxy Vico held a conception of Providence very different from that of Christian theology; and that though he continually used the name of God he never allowed him to operate effectively in history as a personal God; that he made so sharp a distinction between sacred and profane history as to reach a purely natural and human theory of the origin of civilisation, by means of the state of nature, and of the origin of religion, by means of fear, shame and the imaginative universal; while the traditional Catholic doctrine admitted a certain communication between sacred and profane history, and recognised in pagan religion and civilisation the leaven of some kind of vague recollection of the primitive revealed truth; that though protesting that he accepted and reinforced the authority of the Bible, he threatened and shook it on many points; and that his criticism of profane historical tradition, conducted in a haughty spirit of rebellion against the past, might open the road to the most dangerous abuses, since it provoked the application of the same spirit and method to sacred history, which happened in the case of Boulanger.[3] In this accusation are faithfully indicated all the points destined later to enter into the nineteenth century's solemn eulogy of Vico. Thus churchmen began to be suspicious of him; and this bore fruit later in the restoration period, in the anti-Vician polemic of Bishop Colangelo, and somewhat earlier in a verdict of the royal censor Lorenzo Giustiniani, who pronounced the _Scienza Nuova_ "a work marking a most unfortunate crisis in European history."