We have seen that the Divine, the Absolute, can in the nature of the case be conveyed to us mortal men only in inadequate human conceptions and notions. And in the second place those instruments, by whom our faith is conveyed to us, are men, that is to say intelligences conditioned by space and time, restricted by the limitations of their age and of their individuality. Above all they are conditioned by the limitations of their age. Every period of time has its special character, its “spirit,” i.e. a characteristic way, conditioned by its special circumstances, of seeing, feeling, judging and acting. The eternal light of revelation is differently reflected in the prism of each age, with different angles of refraction. The supernatural reality is not manifested in naked truth, as it is in itself, but enters into the particular age and therefore in a form determined by that age. In this way it becomes an enkindling and fruitful and present force; but at the same time it loses in the process something of the austerity and majesty of its supernatural being. It suffers a sort of “emptying” (kenosis), it despoils itself, and takes the form of a slave, as the Divine Word despoiled Himself when He became man. And supernatural truth may sometimes be so far “emptied,” and so much modified by time and circumstance, that the eternal is scarcely visible any more through the veils of time and we are puzzled and distressed. The faithful Catholic is distressed by the “servile” forms which disfigured the Church in certain periods of the Middle Ages. He is distressed, today more than ever, by the medieval Inquisition and by the auto-da-fe. However much he knows that these contrivances are explained by the boundless zeal with which the medieval man, in his utterly objective attitude, willed to protect the stem reality and sublime dignity of supernatural truth; and however much he appreciates the intimate inter-connection of Church and state in the medieval period: yet he cannot but grieve that zeal for objective values in religion and society should have sometimes weakened men’s understanding of personal values, especially of the rights and dignity of conscience, albeit erroneous. He cannot but grieve that pure logic restricted the power of psychological sympathy, so that men sometimes were blind to several of the most luminous teachings of the Gospel, as for instance to the teaching that the Kingdom of God is not of this world and is not a kingdom of the sword, that a man should forgive his offending brother seventy times seven times, and that fire should not be invoked from heaven upon unbelieving cities. And the Catholic is grieved also by the witch trials and their numerous victims. However much he may be aware that this delusion must be regarded, not as a Catholic and religious phenomenon, but as one belonging rather to social history, and that many hundreds of witches were persecuted and put to death in Protestant countries also, and that the first enlightened men to have the courage to range themselves with the Calvinist doctor, Johannes Weyer, and to fight in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the general delusion, such men as Loos, Tanner, Laymann and Spee, were Catholics and mostly Jesuits; yet he grieves very deeply for the “Witch Hammer”[3] and for the Bull “Summis desiderantes” (1484) of Pope Innocent VIII, which although it had, as is clear from the context, no “ex cathedra” and official authority, yet “incontestably helped to further the witch delusion.”[4] The Catholic sorrowfully recognizes that even the holders of the highest and most exalted office on earth can be children of their age and slaves of its conceptions, and that the Holy Spirit in governing the Church does not guard every act of the pope and every papal pronouncement from error and delusion, but is infallibly operative only when the pope speaks “ex cathedra,” i.e. when basing himself on the sources of the faith and in the fullness of his power as Head of the Church and successor of St. Peter, he pronounces a decision in matters of faith or morals which embraces and binds the whole Church.