"No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have, but really, when it comes to intruding into private life---"

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise lectures were delivered in 1960 by Francis Biddle. Published the next year in a slender volume Justice Holmes, Natural Law, and the Supreme Court, the lectures provide Biddle's defense of Holmes from "the assaults of certain Roman Catholic priests teaching in Jesuit law schools." A fair amount of the argumentative work done in the book is done by a simplistic reductive antithesis between "two points of view about the law and the proper approach to its application that are fundamentally opposed, and touch the roots of its life." These are the abstract moralism of Catholic natural law thinkers and the pragmatic empiricism of Justice Holmes. Biddle gets both of these schools of thought wrong, by simplifying natural law thinking and by denying some of the least defensible aspects of Justice Holmes's thought. 

The impressions of Holmes that Biddle wishes to counter are that "Holmes was a cynic, who thought of law as nothing but the application of force; that he believed that morals, basically concerned, were but the expression of individual taste, and had nothing to do with law; and that he held that the proper function of a judge was to carry out what the majority had already decided, whether it was right or wrong." But these impressions are not far off the mark, if at all, as Albert Altschuler set forth in some detail in Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes.

Those studying Holmes are better served by Altshculer than by Biddle. But those interested in understanding a certain strain of anti-Catholic-intellectualism should check out Biddle. Here's a taste:

[Holmes] wished Malthus' teaching in its substance were more taken to heart. G.K. Chesterton, in his Victorian Age in Literature, probably because he was a Catholic, had to be contemptuous of Malthus; and Holmes wrote to his young friend Harold Laski that he was reminded of what Lord Melbourne had said--it had tickled him: "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding into private life---"

All good society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform--although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. . . . He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . .