over men's minds more and more, till it has coerced them into subjection to every Papal pronouncement in matters of religion, morals, politics, and social science. For it will be idle to talk any more of the Pope's encroaching on a foreign domain; he, and he alone, as being infallible, will have the right of determining the limits of his teaching and action at his own good pleasure, and every such determination will bear the stamp of infallibility. When once the narrow adherence of many Catholic theologians to the ancient tradition and the Church of the first six centuries is happily broken through, the pedantic horror of new dogmas completely got rid of, and the well-known canon of St. Vincent, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," which is still respected here and there, set aside-then every Pope, however ignorant of theology, will be free to make what use he likes of his power of dogmatic creativeness, and to erect his own thoughts into the common belief, binding on the whole Church. We say advisedly, "however ignorant he may be of theology," for the Jesuit theologians have already foreseen this contingency as being not an unusual one with Popes, and one of them, Professor Erbermann of Mayence, has observed-" A thoroughly ignorant Pope may very well

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be infallible, for God has before now pointed out the right road by the mouth of a speaking ass." But, after Infallibility has been made into a dogma, whoever dares to question the plenary authority of any new article of faith coined in the Vatican mint, will incur, according to the Jesuits, excommunication in this world and everlasting damnation in the next. Councils will for the future be superfluous; the Bishops will no doubt be assembled in Rome now and then to swell the pomp of a Papal canonization or some other grand ceremony, but they will have nothing more to do with dogmas. If they wish to confirm a Papal decision, itself the result of direct Divine inspiration-as, e.g., the Council of Chalcedon, after careful examination, sanctioned the dogmatic letter of Pope Leo I.,-this would be bringing lanterns to aid the light of the noonday sun. The form hitherto used by the Bishops in subscribing the doctrinal decisions of Councils, definiens subscripsi, would for the future be a blasphemy.

Papal Infallibility, once defined as a dogma, will give the impulse to a theological, ecclesiastical, and even

1 Irenic Cathol. (Mogunt. 1645), cap. vi. p. 97: "Quomodo hinc infertur, nos fidem salutemque nostram ab unico tali homine suspendere et non potius ab eo, qui novit etiam per asinum loquentem dirigere iter nostrum."

political revolution, the nature of which very few-—and least of all those who are urging it on-have clearly realized, and no hand of man will be able to stay its course. In Rome itself the saying will be verified, “Thou wilt shudder thyself at thy likeness to God."

In the next place, the newly-coined article of faith will inevitably take root as the foundation and cornerstone of the whole Roman Catholic edifice. The whole activity of theologians will be concentrated on the one point of ascertaining whether or not a Papal decision can be quoted for any given doctrine, and in labouring to discover and amass proof for it from history and literature. Every other authority will pale beside the living oracle on the Tiber, which speaks with plenary inspiration, and can always be appealed to.

What use in tedious investigations of Scripture, what use in wasting time on the difficult study of tradition, which requires so many kinds of preliminary knowledge, when a single utterance of the infallible Pope may shatter at a breath the labours of half a lifetime, and a telegraphic message to Rome will get an answer in a few hours or a few days, which becomes an axiom and article of faith? On one side the work of theologians will be greatly simplified, while on the other it

becomes harder and more extensive. A single comma in a single Bull (of Pius v. against Baius) has before now led to endless disputes, because it is doubtful whether it should precede or follow certain words, and the whole dogmatic meaning of the Bull depends on its position. But the dispute, which has gone on three centuries, can never be settled now, not even by examint ing the original document at Rome, which is written, according to the old custom, without punctuation. And how will it be in the future? The Rabbis say, every apostrophe in the Bible hang whole mountains of hidden sense," and this will apply equally to Papal Bulls; and thus theology, in the hands of the Ultramontane school, which will alone prevail, promises to become more and more Talmudical.

To prove the dogma of Papal Infallibility from Church history nothing less is required than a complete falsification of it. The declarations of Popes which contradict the doctrines of the Church, or contradict each other (as the same Pope sometimes contradicts himself), will have to be twisted into agreement, so as to show that their heterodox or mutually destructive enunciations are at bottom sound doctrine, or, when a little has been subtracted from one dictum and added to the

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other, are not really contradictory, and mean the same thing. And here future theologians will have to get well indoctrinated in the Rabbinical school; and indeed they will find a good deal of valuable matter ready to their hand in the Jesuit casuists. These last, meantime, will be their best teachers in the skilful manipulation of history. They never had any particular difficulty in manufacturing Church history; they have already performed the most incredible feats in that line. Not to speak now of their zeal for the discovery and dissemination of apocryphal tales of miracles and lives of saints, of which the Catholic world owes to them so many, we will merely refer here to their huge falsification of Spanish Church-history. They have provided Spain with a wholly new history, in accordance with the interests of their Order, as well as the national wish, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; and this could only be accomplished by the Jesuit, Roman De la Higuera, inventing chronicles and archæological records, with the necessary appurtenance of relics, the genuineness of which had to be proved by a miracle brought forward for this express purpose.