Clement XI.-ex cathedra though it was-is only remembered as a yoke laid upon the consciences of a former generation too heavy to bear, and most hardly broken; while the exquisite epistle of his great and sainted predecessor and namesake, though claiming no publication in the papal Chancery, and no ex cathedrâ style, lives for every age, and proves to the very last the fatal contrast between the Roman Church of primitive times and that church as a mere secular court-a temporal and worldly power. Stranger yet is the contrast between the apostleship of peace and charity which St. Clement fulfils to the afflicted Church of Corinth, and the sanguinary Bull of Pope Innocent X. denouncing and abrogating the Peace of Westphalia, because human blood had ceased to flow as a sacrifice to Roman ambition. But the extension of an ex cathedra teaching, given us in the Vatican definition, in the words, "When in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians he defines a doctrine to be held by the Universal Church," presents a new difficulty and one which had not been imported into the question in the days of Serry, whose theory by associating the cardinals with the

pope, as assessors possessing a kind of concurrent jurisdiction, is entirely inconsistent with the " 'pastoral" character of the pope to which the gift is reserved. Yet there is no question that the acts and writings of the popes, down to the period of the great schism in the fourteenth century, are individual acts and utterances; and are not fortified with the consents of the cardinals with whose assent and counter-signatures the later bulls are given. Nor do we find in these earlier documents the tremendous invocations and appeals to the Almighty, or the threat of the indignation of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, and of ourselves, which once made formidable and must ever make hideous and repulsive to the true Christian the documents of a later age. All these diversities of form and style, of brief and bull, consistorial act or mere motus proprius, leave us in a state of confusion regarding the whereabouts of infallibility out of which the most zealous and eloquent of the disciples of the new dogma have not condescended to extricate us. They have laid this heavy burden upon the faith of Christendom; but they themselves have not moved so much as a little finger to lighten it. Having

told us that the gift is a veritatis et fidei nunquam deficientis charisma, which supposes that it is continuous and so attached to the person of the pope as never to fail, they limit and reduce it at last to a certain number of documents little more than a century older than the Reformation, and even take just as many of these as suit their present purpose. The letters of Gregory the Great, which effected and directed the conversion of England, and moulded its faith, fail to possess the ex cathedra seal. They are not constitutions, they are not bulls-they are scarcely briefs-they were not sealed with lead, nor have they anything in them of the stilus curia. They were not expedited in the Roman Chancery nor affixed to the Lateran Church, nor to the public places in Rome, as an authentic act of infallibility requires. Again, the learned expositions of doctrine which Pope Benedict XIV. has given to the whole world in his treatises "On the Sacrifice of the Mass," on the "Festivals," and on a "Diocesan Synod"-nay, his work on the "Canonization of the Saints" which constitutes the text-book and supreme authority in the conduct of that dangerous and half-pagan pro

cess, has no ex cathedrâ authority, though his bulls, which for the most part are perfectly worthless, have that dignity. Yet in both cases he was fulfilling his pastoral office; in both cases he was addressing the whole world. It is thus that the advocates of the infallibility are continually suspended between heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin, and are never able to say in what cases a pope may be held to speak from his chair, urbi et orbi. Pope Pius VI., in a brief addressed to Bishop Pannilini in 1786, affirms that even the decrees of the Roman Congregations of the Inquisition and the Index are ex cathedrâ judgments, and claims implicit obedience to them as "dogmatica judicia quae Petri cathedra tulit" (Atti dell' Assemblea, tom. iv. p. 74). This puts an end to the controversy on the nature of the condemnation of Galileo and the Copernican system, while it adds to the already heavy burden of the Bullarium Magnum, the records of the Roman Congregations exceeding, probably, by hundreds of volumes, the sixty folios of the published utterances of infallibility. Yet so confused are the minds of the infalliblists in regard to the tests of an ex cathedra decree, that our appeal to

the popes will necessarily be met in many cases by the allegation, "This is his mere private opinion, he is not speaking from his chair." Our only reply must be, "He is speaking on the faith-He is speaking to the world generally even though he is speaking to a separate church or to an individual— he is supposed to speak while in full possession of a never-failing charisma. He satisfies, therefore, the Vatican definition, and establishes his claim to be heard even while he is disavowing the possession of infallibility and disproving his own irreformability."

This was the just conclusion of the Parliament of Paris two centuries ago, which numbered in its ranks some of the greatest jurists of the age. To them it appeared not unreasonable to inquire what the popes themselves have said from time to time on the privilege which had been rather claimed for them by their later flatterers than asserted by themselves. They rightly judged that the opinions. of the parties most interested in the claim, however worthless they might be in establishing such a doctrine, were not altogether to be neglected when they contributed to its disproof; for here, at least, they were disinterested witnesses.