otherwise at Trent, where all the fathers, divided into four congregations, could take real part in the proceedings. To this is added now the monstrous disproportion of national representation; the altogether enormous and all-absorbing preponderance of the Italians, still farther strengthened by the whole troop of apostolic vicars, which, without any legal form, can be turned out from the Propaganda at any time. So it is that the Italian bishops alone are more numerous, than all the French, German, Hungarian and North American taken together, although these represent an almost three times larger population. Through the weakness of the two French Cardinals who should have taken the lead, Bonnechose and Mathieu, the attempt to unite the French bishops in a national group failed. Bonnechose consulting Antonelli on the subject got for answer: Only in groups of fifteen, or at short twenty bishops, may the French meet together. The evil of this was soon apparent. The bishops have been forced by the will of the Pope to hold their sessions in a hall, where a third part of them at least could not understand a word that was spoken; so that for example, Cardinal di Pietro after a long time declared, he had not yet actually comprehended a single address; while another Cardinal affirmed, that of all the addresses not forty words had reached him. A truly thorough investigation, a living exchange of thought and counter thought, is here out of the question. No speaker may hope to produce an effect on such an audience. Thus it happened that the first schema, a document of 150 pages, was spoken upon for many weeks in a general way, without its coming to a special discussion of any of the single articles, and in spite of the numerous speakers also without the bringing of any one point to a clear conclusion. The only effect was, great loss of time, much bodily weariness, and deep discouragement. If the object had been to sicken the assembly of all addresses even to loathing, it could not have been contrived better. If only the fathers might have read the discourses which they could not hear, but, alas, neither must they be read; not even at their own cost may the bishops have their overtures and speeches printed. Many in this way, from the certainty

of not being heard, have lost the power of expressing their views altogether. Vast preparations were made in the two years before the opening of the Council, amounting to stuff for ten councils; but it is only brought out for the bishops in fragments, so that there is wanting with them all insight into the consideration and meaning of single determinations. Seven hundred bishops in this way have had set before them a previously fabricated council, which like a woven pattern they are now forced to unravel again. In this work, having no means allowed them for preliminary common understanding, the body has become in large part deaf-dumb; and has got itself fairly jammed into a narrow pass, from which it can never extricate itself without an entire change in its order of business. No man is able to say how it is to be with the discussion of the single articles of the several schemata, and yet the Council, in issuing decrees that are to bind the world under pain of an accompanying anathema, is bound surely to weigh every word in the most careful way."

So much from this French witness. It is a graphic sketch, showing clearly the spiritual impotency of the Vatican Council for the work it was called to do, so far as all the laws of ordinary human intelligence and conscience are concerned. What shall we say then? Must we believe that these ordinary conditions of right human judgment were not needed in this case, and that their absence only served to make room the more fully for the presence of the Divine Spirit with which the Bishop of Rome claims to have been endowed for the occasion? That seems to be virtually what we are required to believe by the modern ultramontane would be task-masters of our faith. The authority of the Vatican Council had in this view nothing to do with the capacity of the body for its work: the all-sufficiency of the Pope makes that all right.

And more yet; this all-sufficiency of the Pope has nothing to do with the personal capabilities of the Pope in any other view for the exercise of his high and mighty office.* It is a

There have been Popes in past time more hard to get along with, in this view, than Pius IX. Even in his case, however, it requi es a very stout faith, to jion

magical appendix belonging to the office itself, which all men are bound to accept as the rule and measure of their faith without regard to any conditions whatever holding in the material object of their faith otherwise considered. All hinges on the form of the faith, as an act of blind submission to the authority of him who claims to be the mouth-piece of our Lord Jesus Christ in Rome. Were he a Caiaphas or a Balaam, he must still be trusted in implicitly as being for the time the infallible. high-priest and prophet of God. We mean here no caricature. The Vatican decree if we understand it, comes just to this, and nothing less than this. A hard saying, intelligence and conscience may exclaim; who can hear it? But then intelligence and conscience are roughly reminded that the unbelieving Jews (John vi. 60), used the very same language toward Christ Himself; and that the first law of the Christian kingdom is the bringing into captivity of all thought and intelligence to the obedience of Christ.

The harder the cost of faith in this view, we are told, the greater the merit and the power of faith. That indeed is the

the conception of infallibility firmly and calmly with what seem to be the incommensurable personal qualities of the man otherwise considered. Take him in his ordinary human character, and he is represented as having been always noted for a certain frivolity of spirit joined with a self-willed impatient temper. He never had any taste for theological studies. Gregory XVI. had no confidence in him, and predicted that if he ever became pope he wou'd ruin the Church. Originally in the interest of the Liberals, he threw himself after his flight to Gaeta into the hands of the Jesuits, who now use him as clay is used by the potter. They relieve him of the trouble of thinking. They do his science for him by proxy. Pa saglia declared that even after he had signed the decree of the Immaculate Conception he knew not what it meant. It is known generally in Rome, that he reads no book, but only small pamphlets and some journals. With all this he is given to free talk, in a loose, imprudent way. "For my part," said a Roman ecclesiastic to Prof. Friedrich in Rome, "I need no other argument that the Pope is not infallible than this, that I have never in all my life met with a man who was less exact with the truth, than just Pius IX." His superstition knows no bounds. He fancies himself the subject of special inspirations, which have for him the force of fixed ideas, and go farther with him at times, even in serious affairs, than any other reason. These things are drawn from Friedrich's Tagebuch. Now the problem is, how to think the endowment of personal infallibility into such a personality. Pius himself finds no difficulty in the matter. "When I was the Abbot Mastai," he tells us, "I believed in papal infallibility, but now as Pope Mastai I feel it." It is with him a matter of intuition.

very sense of the famous or rather infamous sacrificio dell' intelleto, which the military spirit of the school of Loyola has now made to be the soul of all religion in the Roman Church. It means the slaughter of the understanding, the immolation of the will, the conversion of all free personality on the part of men into the passive obedience of a corpse. And for such faith, it must be confessed, the late Vatican decree offers an admirable lesson to begin with, It is here multum in parvo, or rather all in a nutshell. That it goes against conscience, and delivers reason bound hand and foot over into the hands of the uncircumcised Philistines, only fits it the more to serve its own end; only makes it a more suitable engine for grinding into the souls of men the cadaverous faith of the Jesuit.

That the action of the Vatican Council, revealing to the world such a complete triumph of Ultramontanism, should have called forth open resistance and protest in the Roman Catholic Church, is not to be considered strange. The only wonder is, considering what had place before and during the Council, that the opposition should not have been more widespread and serious than it has yet proved to be in fact. Nothing could well go farther to show the dread power of the system which has now got the Papacy fully into its hands, and whose attitude at this time amounts to a bold defiance hurled toward the powers of the world's civilization in every other form.

In France, the voices that were heard from high places against the new doctrine before the 18th of July, 1870, have since ceased to be heard. The Sorbonne and the Episcopate have together wheeled into line. The memory of Bossuet is dishonored, and the Gallican liberties are turned into reproach. How it has fared with the German Bishops, we have already seen. They recanted, all of them, their own good confession made before their going to Rome, and also during their stay in Rome; some of them not without much tribulation of spirit; and are now moving heaven and earth to oppose and put down the very truth which they themselves before confessed. And with some at least of our North American prelates (in Canada and

the United States), it is known there has been just the same tergiversation. Disgusted with the course of things in Rome, they have learned to see nevertheless, since their return, that all was right, and are now ready to insist on the infallibility of Pius IX, as no less certain for faith than the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

All this is marvellous; and it is not strange that zealous Romanists see in it an argument for the oecumenicity of the late Council, a sort of divine seal openly impressed upon it by the hand of the Almighty Himself. The world has not known a larger council, nor one of apparently more overpowering force. But all depends on the nature and character of this force. Has it been of heaven or of men? Is the unity that has followed it a living unity, or is it rather the unity of death? There is room for this question: and it may be so answered that the present seeming triumph of Ultramontanism shall be construed into a sign of weakness rather than strength, a handwriting of judgment on the wall rather than a bow of promise in the cloud. This construction has been put upon it in fact by the new race of reformers which has sprung up in the German Catholic Church. They see in it only the doom of Belshazzar and the fall of Babylon.

This old Catholic Movement, as it is called, dates from the 18th of July, 1870, when the Vatican Council pronounced the infallibility of the Pope a necessary article of the Christian. faith. It grew forth from the integrity of those who had previously protested against the introduction of this dogma as subversive of the ancient Catholic truth, and who now held themselves bound to stand firm to that good testimony, even when their own ecclesiastical leaders shamefully fell away from it, and when confession was seen to mean for them nothing less than martyrdom of the soul in the most serious form. As Prof. Reinkens shows with great force in the article translated for last number of this REVIEW, it was through the birth throes of conscience, the great question of personal spiritual responsibility over against the imposition of blind outward authority, that the new strange life made its appearance in the Catholic world; and