And many of us, at any rate, comfort ourselves with the thought that a great many of the regulations which appear to be most tyrannical and most to interfere with the natural liberty of mankind are devised not with that end in view but with the righteous intention of protecting those weaker members of the body who are unable to protect themselves. If the State does not stand by such members and offer itself as their shield and support, it has no claim to our obedience, no real right to exist, and so we put up with the inconvenience, should such arise, on account of the protection given to the weaker members and often extended to those who would by no means feel pleased if they heard themselves thus described.
Let us substitute the Church for the State and let us remember that there are times when she is at closer grips with the powers of evil than may be the case at other times. The parallel is surely sufficiently close.
So far as earthly laws can control one, no one is obliged to be a member of the Catholic Church nor a citizen of the British Empire. I can, if I choose, emigrate to America, in process of time naturalise myself there and join the Christian Science organisation or any other body to which I find myself attracted. But as long as I remain a Catholic and a British citizen I must submit myself to the restrictions imposed by the bodies with which I have elected to connect myself. We arrive at the conclusion then that the ordinary citizen, even if he never adverts to the fact, is in reality controlled and his liberty limited in all sorts of directions.
Now the scientific man, in his own work, is subject to all sorts of limitations, apart altogether from the limitations to which, as an ordinary member of the State, he has to submit himself.
He is restricted by science: he is not completely free but is bound by knowledge--the knowledge which he or others have acquired.
To say he is limited by it is not to say that he is imprisoned by it or in bondage to it. "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or doing them by laborious methods!"