In the first place there is that conflict between authority and human liberty which necessarily results from the Catholic doctrine of authority. This conflict may be seen whenever the human ego runs up against alien, rigid and inexorable facts, against laws and ordinances which seem to crib and confine the free movement of the mind. This is especially the case, therefore, in the region of theology, in the science of our faith. Supernatural revelation is not human wisdom, but the Word of God. Its new truth does not originate in humanity as its primal source, not even in the depths of human sub- consciousness, but is essentially given from above. Therefore it can be communicated to men only by the way of authority, by that living series of bishops who are descended from the apostles and conjoined to them in a spiritual unity through the sacrament of the imposition of hands, and especially by the successor of St. Peter. Church authority is a necessary correlative of supernatural revelation. So that Church authority is the one pole of the Catholic life of faith. The Catholic does not get his final decision regarding the truths of revelation from philologists and historians, but from the primary witnesses and depositories of this truth, from the messianic authority of the Word, Christ, perpetuated through the centuries in pope and bishops. Consequently the Catholic is in his faith inwardly bound to obey the authoritative teaching of his Church, which is the echo of the preaching of Jesus. On the other hand the Church prohibits all blind faith and merely external conformity. The affirmation accorded to the Church’s teaching must be a convinced and inward affirmation, and so an affirmation of the free moral personality, and an affirmation which rests, in proportion to a man’s degree of education, upon personal insight into the grounds of faith and into its historical and philosophical presuppositions. And since this personal insight cannot be attained by a scholar without severely scientific method, therefore the Church cannot possibly be an enemy to sober criticism, least of all to the so-called “historico-critical” method. Even the much-attacked anti-modernist encyclical of Pope Pius X (Pascendi) and the anti-modernist oath, do not forbid this method, but rather presuppose it. What they forbid is simply this, that men should make the affirmation of supernatural faith dependent exclusively on the results of this method, thereby subjecting it wholly to philologists and historians, and to profane science. Our faith does not rest upon dead documents, but upon the living witness of that stream of tradition which has brought its doctrines down from Christ through the apostles and the apostolical succession of bishops to the present day. Christianity is not a religion of dead documents and fragmentary records, but a life in the Holy Spirit preserved from generation to generation by the apostolical succession of commissioned preachers. The historico-critical method, if it would not lose itself in extravagant and unlimited criticism, must adjust itself to this life which pulsates through the heritage of revealed truth. That was what the papal encyclical meant when it declared—in words that have been so much misunderstood—that holy Scripture and the Fathers are not to be interpreted “merely by the principles of science” (non solis scientiae principiis). The surging life of the Christian present flows over the dead records of primitive documents, or rather, these documents are themselves nothing but that life grown stiff and numb, nothing but a deposit of that holy and supernatural life which still enfolds us in the present. Therefore those documents can be fully deciphered and yield their true revealed sense only in the light of this life. So the Church does not quarrel with the historico-critical method, or dispute the right and duty of scientific research. What she does is to guard against the abuse of these things, to prevent the neglect of that living element in Christianity wherein these methods should find their final norm and standard. By means of this life of hers, by means of the clear daylight of her revealed knowledge, she is ever throwing new light upon the problems of the lower and higher criticism, upon the problems of scriptural and patristic theology. And when she believes that central thoughts of the Christian revelation are menaced, then by means of her Congregations—not in the name of science, but in the name of her faith—she utters her prohibition against such teaching.