To most people it will be utterly uncomprehensible, however, that after all that they have heard about Church opposition to science and Papal discouragement of education as dangerous to faith, there should now be an absolute denial of the supposed grounds for the assertions in this matter. Most readers, even among educated people, will be very prone to think that their impressions in these matters cannot be entirely wrong, and {24} that previous writers on the subject cannot have been either deceiving or deceived. In all that relates to the Roman Catholic Church, however, before the date of the so-called reformation, it is important to remember that there came into existence a definite body of Protestant tradition, the creation of the reformers who wished to blacken the memory of the Old Church as much as possible to justify their own apostasy, and who therefore spared no means to pervert the facts of history or to exaggerate the significance of historical details so as to produce this false impression. Subsequent generations were oftener deceived themselves than deceiving. They were sure that the Church was opposed to education and to science, and consequently it was not hard for them to read in certain incidents and documents a meaning quite other than their actual significance, because this added meaning agreed with their prejudices on these subjects. Every advance in modern history, every modification of view that has been brought about by the critical historical method of recent times, has emphasized this point of view almost without exception. The distinguished philosophic and historical writer, the Comte de Maistre, in his Soirées of St. Petersburg about a century ago, declared that "History for the last three centuries (1500-1800) has been a conspiracy against the truth." Just about a century later the editors of the Cambridge Modern History, in the preface to the first volume of their monumental work, re-echoed the words of the Comte de Maistre almost literally in a pregnant paragraph which deserves to be in the note-book of everyone who is trying to get at the real truth of history. They said: {25}