The international Committee of the minority thought it necessary that a treatise should be expressly composed to discuss the weighty question of moral unanimity being required for dogmatic decrees, and Dupanloup has undertaken the task. He had a pamphlet on the subject printed at Naples and laid before the Fathers. He first proves from history that this condition was never wanting in any Councils which count as œcumenical, and was distinctly recognised and maintained at Trent by the Pope himself. He then examines the opinions of the chief theologians of all ages, including St. Vincent of Lerins and St. Augustine, and Popes Leo I., Vigilius and Gregory the Great, who all agree in making moral unanimity an indispensable condition for a decree on faith. He proceeds to observe that in matters of discipline and canon law a numerical majority is enough, as decisions of that kind may be altered afterwards, but for a dogma there must be moral unanimity of the Council and the Churches to whose faith it bears witness, or else Catholicism would be annihilated. But great theologians and theological schools of former ages opposed papal infallibility, and it is opposed now by a large number of Bishops at the Vatican Council representing great Churches and Catholic nations. A

Council is only then infallible when the assembled Bishops of the whole Church bear witness to the faith inherited from the beginning. The majority must therefore either convert the minority to their views by free discussion or give up their design; were they to suppress the minority by mere brute force of numbers, that would be unconciliar and unprecedented in Church history. It is not mere probability but unquestionable certainty that is required for defining a dogma, and a considerable number of distinguished members of the Council have no such firm belief in papal infallibility. To define it in spite of this would be to act as judges and masters of faith, not as its depositaries and witnesses. A minority denying a dogma which had been the perpetual belief of the Church would be in the wrong, but not a minority repudiating the definition of a doctrine which had never been held an article of faith. Even the Pope cannot by his authority raise the decision of a mere majority to the dignity of a dogma, for he only promulgates decrees on faith "sacro approbante Concilio," and without moral unanimity the Council has not approved. The words of the Bishop of Orleans are directed principally against the Civiltà, which has notoriously laboured to establish the opposite

hypothesis, and he asks, "Are we at a Council or not? If we are, the rules of Councils must be observed, or else a great assembly of Bishops is reduced simply to playing the part of a theatrical exhibition."

Dupanloup goes on to remark on the storms and incalculable evils which the definition of papal infallibility would bring on the Church and the Papacy. He concludes with these words: "If ever moral unanimity was requisite for a dogmatic decision, it is so at a Council like the Vatican, where there are 276 Italian Bishops, of whom 143 belong to the States of the Church; 43 Cardinals, of whom 23 are not Bishops or have no Sees; 120 Archbishops or Bishops in partibus, and 51 Abbots or Generals of Orders--while the Bishops present from all Catholic countries of Europe, exclusive of Italy, only number 265, so that the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and diocesan Bishops of the whole world are outnumbered by the diocesan Bishops of Italy alone. At a Council so composed a mere majority can never decide; and the less so when the personal intervention of the Pope makes itself felt, when the freedom of the Bishops is so seriously hampered, and in so many ways, when the question of infallibility has been so

1 He should have said "the Italian prelates."

unscrupulously and violently brought forward for discussion by a mere sovereign act-a sort of coup d'étatwhen consciences are tormented and a number of writings are issued which have created a great sensation and give evidence of the anxiety of the faithful, and when lastly the Bishops themselves let a cry escape from their tortured hearts which the whole press reechoes. Under such circumstances it is impossible to settle the matter by a mere coup of the majority; and if it is done all kinds of mischief must be feared. Nor is it I alone who say so; there are 100 Bishops who say, “An intolerable burden would be laid on our consciences. We should fear that the cecumenical character of the Council would be called in question, and abundant materials supplied to the enemies of religion for assailing the Holy See and the Council, and that it would be without authority in the eyes of the Christian world, as having been no true and no free Council. And in these troubled times no greater evil can well be conceived."

FIFTY-SECOND LETTER.

Rome, June 3, 1870.-Valerga attacked the "Gallicans," drawing a parallel between the Pope and Christ, and between the Fallibilists and Monothelites. As in Christ the human will co-existed with the divine, so in the Pope may personal infallibility co-exist with moral sinfulness, and to conclude from the former against the latter to draw an argument from scandals in papal history against the privilegium inerrantia-is analogous to the error of the Monothelites, who denied the possibility of a human will subject to sin co-existing with the divine will in the same person. Never has the well-known spirit of the Roman Curia shown itself so openly and with such technical adroitness as in this carefully elaborated and minute accusation against the Opposition. As Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati expressed it, it was "exemplum sophismatum artis ad instar congestorum," and great expectations might be