Influential writers of our time encourage this attitude, or at least recommend a more sympathetic appreciation of Catholicism. Soderblom, the distinguished religious philosopher and Protestant Archbishop of Upsala, would have had his co-religionists recognize “that Roman Christianity is essentially something other than lust of power, saint worship and jesuitry. In its deepest essence it connotes a type of piety, which is not Protestant piety, and yet is perfect in its kind. Nay, it is more perfect than Protestant piety…. We have too little developed Schleiermacher’s great plan of an apologetic devoted to the study of the essential nature of the various religions and sects known to history, and of a polemic which, utterly devoid of all sectarianism, should in the name of that essential nature fight against those degenerations which everywhere assail it.”[8] And Heiler has recently lamented the insufficient understanding of the nature of Catholicism by non-Catholic theologians. “Generally speaking, Protestant polemic sees only the outer walls of the Catholic cathedral, with their cracks and crevices and their weather-beaten masonry; but the wondrous artistry of the interior is hidden from it. The most vital and the purest aspects of Catholicism remain still, even in this our day, practically unknown to Protestant theology; and for that reason it is denied any complete or intimate appreciation of Catholicism.”[9]

And if the learned theologian fails to comprehend the essence of Catholicism, can we wonder that among the Protestant masses who are not theologians, whatever their degree of education or lack of it, there is an ignorance of Catholicism which is deeply deplored by the more farseeing minds on their own side, and which as the cause of the worst kind of prejudice produces indifference and dislike, nay, even contempt of Catholic piety, and intensifies continually the lamentable cleavage between the Catholic and Protestant sections of our people? That great Protestant scholar and historian of dogma, Adolf Harnack, remarks of this ignorance. “I am convinced from constant experience of the fact that the students who leave our schools have the most disconnected and absurd ideas about ecclesiastical history. Some of them know something about Gnosticism, or about other curious and for them worthless details. But of the Catholic Church, the greatest religious and political creation known to history, they know absolutely nothing, and they indulge in its regard in wholly trivial, vague, and often directly nonsensical notions. How her greatest institutions originated, what they mean in the life of the Church, how easily they may be misconceived, and why they function so surely and so impressively: all this, according to my experience, is for them, apart from a few exceptions, a “terra incognita.”[10]