Last evening in Appleton Chapel the Reverend Brooke Herford, D. D., delivered the Dudleian lecture the third in the series of four lectures prescribed by the will of Judge Dudley in 1750. Dr. Herford's subject was "The answer of modern Liberalism to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church."

Dr. Herford began by quoting the clause in Judge Dudley's will prescribing the lecture to be "For the detecting, and convicting, and exposing the idolatry of the Romish Church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickednesses in their high places, and finally that the Church of Rome is that mystical Babylon, that man of sin, that apostate church spoken of in the New Testament."

Contiuing he said that many persons would wonder that so late as one hundred and fifty years ago any man could have written such words against any Christian Church. It was not, however, as a religious body that the Roman Church appeared to the people of New England in 1750, but as a great ecclesiastical system which had acquired a marvelous power over men and kingdoms,- the body that had applauded Saint Bartholomew's Day and backed up Spain, England's inveterate enemy.

Years before Dudley came to Harvard College there were in New England a number of French Huguenots driven into exile by the edict of Nantes. The story of their sufferings on account of their faith awakened the sympathy of the New Englanders. The Indian massacres, which wrought such havoc on the quiet New England settlements, were believed to be instigated by the Jesuit priests in Canada. These facts account for Judge Dudley's bitterness toward the Catholics.

Since Dudley's time a great change has come about. Modern liberalism does not desire to molest the Catholics, it wishes to let them have every chance. Not long ago a Catholic delivered one of the Dudleian lectures, a fact that shows the liberality of the present American feeling toward Catholics. The Catholic Church occupies a very important public position. No party, no statesman leaves it out of account. It has a tremendous power. It claims to be the direct organ of God, and, for that reason, absolute and infallible. These great and unique claims can not be passed over without a challenge. This is the answer of liberalism:

The claim of the Catholic Church to absolute authority on questions of religion and morals can not be allowed, nor the doctrine of infallibility ever accepted. Even if the Catholic Church was right in the controversy concerning the meaning of the rock on which Christ founded his church, its claims to absolute authority and infallibility could not rest without being scouted. The impotency and falsity of the Catholic Church's policy are manifest. In so many ages it ought to have brought men to an earlier knowledge of learning and opened the way to the new discoveries in science. Instead the Roman Church retarded science in every possible way. It pronounced strong opinions, but wrong ones. Gallileo was persecuted, and the Copernican theory pronounced false and heretical. How can a church be infallible, which has made so many blunders? It has decreed the absolute verbal inspiration of the Bible, which every biblical scholar knows is not the fact, declared that the scriptures should be interpreted by the Church Fathers, and ordained that not the Bible but the church's interpretation of the Bible was to be believed.

The Catholic Church's view of liberty is singularly inconsistent. In England and America it stands forward as the champion of liberty. In Spain, Austria, and Belgium, where the Catholic Church has paramount authority, liberty does not exist. The Catholic Church claims, too, that it has always been the ideal of truth and honesty. As a matter of fact the reverse is the case. The Church now denies the concessions it made on being allowed to have freedom of worship in England in 1825. It openly admits the imposition of "pious frauds," and claims that faith need not be kept with Protestants. Whether the Catholic Church will ever abandon its absurd claims to infallibility, it will always be the duty of its members to do their duty before God and man.