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Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Free thought. (search)
, even in the most devout Catholic, and that of the Jesuit or the native liegeman of Rome, there cannot fail to be an opposition more or less acute, though it may be hidden as far as possible under a decent veil. This was seen in the case of Father Hecker, who had begun his career as a Socialist at Brook Farm, and, as a convert to Catholicism, founded a missionary order, the keynote of which was that man's life in the natural and secular order of things is marching towards freedom and personalill deposed. In the American or any other branch of the Roman Catholic Church freedom of inquiry and advance in thought are of course impossible. Nothing is possible but immobility, or reaction such as that of the syllabus. Dr. Brownson, like Hecker, a convert, showed after his conversion something of the spirit of free inquiry belonging to his former state, though rather in the line of philosophy than in that of theology, properly speaking. But if he ever departed from orthodoxy he returne