To himself--for though his noble mind would never have run a-ground amid the miserable shallows of Rationalism, yet had it not then taken refuge in the secure haven of Catholicism, it might have been sucked down in the rapid eddies of Pantheism. To the Catholic body in Germany, this event was no less opportune; and for the reasons that shall now be stated. Germany, which in the middle age had produced so many distinguished poets, artists, and philosophers, was, at the Reformation, shorn of much of her intellectual strength. In the disastrous thirty years' war, which that event brought about, she saw her universities robbed of their most distinguished ornaments, and the lights, which ought to have adorned her at home, shedding their lustre on foreign lands. The general languor and exhaustion of the German mind, consequent on that fearful and convulsive struggle, was apparent enough in the literature of the age, which ensued after the treaty of Westphalia. To these causes, which produced this general declension of German intellect, must be added one which specially applies to the Catholic portion of Germany. Every great abuse of human reason, by a natural revulsion of feeling, inspires a certain dread and distrust of its powers. This has been more than once exemplified in the history of the church. So, at this momentous period, some of the German Catholic powers sought in obscurantism, a refuge and security against religious and political innovations, and denied to science that encouragement which she had a right to look for at their hands:--a policy as infatuated as it is culpable, for, while ignorance draws down contempt and disgrace on religion, it begets in its turn, as a melancholy experience has proved, those very errors and that very unbelief, against which it was designed as a protection. Had the court of Austria acceded to the proposal of Leibnitz for establishing at Vienna that academy of sciences which he afterwards succeeded in founding at Berlin, the glory of that great resuscitation of the German mind, which occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, would have then probably redounded to Catholic, rather than to Protestant, Germany. But the German Catholics, though they started later in the career of intellectual improvement, have at length reached, and even outstripped, their Protestant brethren in the race.