and them? Is not the world by far the most formidable of the three, especially as against the Church herself? By this world, with its impious principles, its wisdom, denounced by the Apostle, with its deadly hate, with its mighty power, the Church, but for a mightier power, would have ages ago been swept from the face of the earth-her name dimly remembered, like the names of ancient dynasties that have so long perished from among men. The world! Is not Quirinus one of her million evangelists, paid to spread her lying gospel, paid in the fairy coin with which she rewards her faithful servants, in the clapping hands and loud praises of her great chiefs and her nimble scribes? The world! Is not the Vicar of Christ the one only man on earth, to whom is given the full and supreme and universal commission to watch the insidious devices and evil teachings of the world, and in season and out of season to denounce, and condemn, and warn against them? Quirinus censures the Pope for despising the judgment of the world. Is he to respect it? Certainly not. Is he to hold himself indifferent to it as to a thing in itself neither good nor bad? Certainly not: for it is not so. He is to despise it, then. He is to despise it, as in itself despicable-folly and madness, as the Scripture, times without number, designates it. He is to despise it by not fearing it: for, though it rushes on him with great fury, he knows that it cannot prevail against him or against the Church built on him. He is to despise it by putting it aside and taking no account of it, in executing his first great task of teaching his flock, of guarding the deposit. Is the Pope to consult the devil's hornbook as a guide to be attended to in announcing the pure Gospel of Christ? And now we think we have, from Quirinus's own pages, produced materials abundant for forming a just estimate of the man and the writer; for setting his character and his authority in their true light, clearly and fully. Intrinsically and seen through, he is nothing-not worth two drops of the ink we have wasted on him. But he represents a sect, contemptible indeed in its numbers, but strong in malice, indefatigable and unscrupulous in the pursuit of its object through dark and tortuous ways, hypocritical and mendacious.* "The number of fools is infinite," says the Wise Man. The sect knows this; and knows, too, the old saying, "Fling plenty We take the following extracts from the admirable essay on the spirit of Jansenism, prefixed by F. Dalgairns to his treatise on Devotion to the Sacred Heart :-- "Jansenism was a planned systematic conspiracy against Rome, but not in the same sense as that of Luther and Calvin. Geneva and Augsburg waged an open war. Jansenism was a secret plot. Its strength did not lie in its of dirt, some will stick." It is for this reason that, on second thought, we have devoted so much space to the exposure of uirinus's true spirit-on second thought: for in commencing his article we had no other idea than that of tossing him off n a couple of sentences, and leaving him to rot into the oblivion which he was sure in no distant time to reach. One word more, and we part with him for ever.* The charge of want of freedom in the Council, on which, as we have already intimated, Quirinus keeps so constantly harping, requires not now any serious notice-required not at any time, but certainly requires not now, when the lapse of more than two years since the day of the great definition has displayed to the world such stupendous evidence of the perfect unity of the Church, "the whole body compacted and fitly joined together." Of all the arguments and insinuations levelled by Quirinus against the freedom of the Council there is but one, doctrines, but in the terrible tenacity with which its disciples clung to them, and the no less terrible obstinacy with which they determined to remain within the visible communion of the Church of God, for the very purpose of eating into its vitals, and braving its decrees. "They [the Jansenists] thought themselves happy if, with painful erudition, they discovered that the narrator of the triumphant death of a martyr made some blunder in the name of a Roman legion, or in the official title of some Roman magistrate. . . . . Such was Jansenism in its first stage, the most repulsive and the most dishonest of heresies. "Their great principle, that it was possible to belong to the Church and yet be her opponent in matters in which she was not infallible, and their claim at the same time to be the judges of those matters. "The only real and thorough Jesuitism, in the Protestant sense of the word, was Jansenism." (pp. 6, 30, 32, 46.) This picture is, we can say, from long and close acquaintance with the subject, a perfect photograph. 66 * The present writer read on its first appearance, and read with unbounded delight, the pastoral of Archbishop Manning on "The Council and its Definitions," published towards the close of 1870. But, partly from old and intimate familiarity with the theological ground over which the Archbishop travels, and with so many of the writers who had travelled the same ground long before him; partly from the effect of twenty intervening and busy months, tinging with browner shade the evening of life" and its fading power of memory; he had lost, except on one point, all distinct recollection of the details of that pastoral. On turning to it while writing one of the preceding paragraphs, he was most agreeably surprised to find that most of what he had marked in Quirinus for further exposure had been already noticed therein. We are glad of this for two reasons: first, because it abridges our work; secondly and principally, because, exclusive of other considerations, Dr. Manning's constant and active connection with the proceedings of the Council from first to last (Pastoral, pp. 2, 24) gives to his testimony a peculiar weight. We would beg to direct special attention to chapter 4, "Scientific History and the Catholic Rule of Faith." The reasoning is as clear and unanswerable as a mathematical demonstration. which, if the statement of fact on which it is based were true, would tell seriously against that freedom. "Here the Bishops are in a sense the Pope's prisoners. . . . . It is the Pope who makes the decrees and defines the dogmas; the Council has simply to assent" (p. 147). "On their [the Bishops'] arrival they were strung and fixed, like the keys of a harpsichord, into the great conciliar instrument, and they find that they are to be used by the hand of the mighty musician to produce tones which sound to themselves most utterly nauseous" (p. 292). "Even the most abject Placet-men of the majority .... had not quite expected to be summoned to Rome, simply in order to formulate the lecture notes of a Jesuit into dogmatic decrees for the whole Church" (p. 327). The Bishops or theologians, or both together, were summoned to Rome, that they "might simply endorse the elaborations of the Jesuits as voting-machines in the prison-house of the Council" (p. 502). Now it so happens, most unfortunately for Quirinus, that Friedrich has given, in the second part of the work named at the head of this article, the whole of the original drafts or schemata (the Jesuit" lecture notes" and "elaborations") as submitted to the Bishops. We beg the reader to compare, as we have compared, these drafts of the two dogmatic constitutions with the constitutions themselves as finally adopted and decreed; and he will find hardly a single paragraph or sentence, we believe not even one, standing in the latter as it stood in the former. Except in the general titles, "on Faith " and "on the Church," everything is altered,-the arrangement, the titles of the chapters, the matter of the chapters-not a little entirely eliminated-not a little entirely new introduced In the first Constitution the Schema is cut down to about one-half its original dimensions, eighteen chapters reduced to four, a whole batch of matter entirely suppressed, and a whole batch of new canons subjoined. The second Constitution is reduced to about one-third of its original compass,four chapters instead of fifteen, much very weighty matter put out altogether; the chapter on the Papal infallibility, not in the Schema in any form, inserted, and a series of canons expunged. In short, the Bishops so hacked and so completely transformed the Schemata, leaving but the faintest outline of them in their Constitutions, as if they had thereby intended to give to the He has since *Friedrich was one of Quirinus's fellow conspirators. openly turned New Protestant. Of upwards of twelve hundred priests be longing to the diocese of Munich, just three have joined the Döllinger sect. This fact we have been assured of by a Bishop of the highest character, who, in the course of last spring, himself had it from the lips of the Vicar-general of that diocese. world the clearest and most palpable proof that these Constitutions were altogether their own work, their own free and deliberate work, and no mistake about it. We thank Friedrich for giving us those documents, which we have not seen elsewhere, showing, as they do, that Quirinus is one of the greatest liars that ever lived, greater even than Macaulay's Barère-greater, and with this difference, that Barère lied to cover his own past infamy, while Quirinus lies to load with infamy the Vicar of Christ and the Bishops of the Church of Christ. We have hitherto spoken of the ecumenicity of the Vatican Council under the two first conditions of convocation and celebration. Of the ecumenicity of the Council in its final issue we need not say one word; for this the only condition required, according to all Catholic theologians, is the confirmation of the Council by the Pope. The Jansenists, indeed, insisted also on the acceptance of the Council by the universal Church. But even this condition, were it necessary, has been fulfilled in a most marvellous manner. The lapse of more than two years has, as we observed above, exhibited the perfect unity of the Church to the eyes of all men. This and all other attributes of the Church remain always in her, undiminished, untainted; but their outward manifestations and signs are sometimes to the eye of the world, as well as to the eye of faith, far more splendid than at others. The sun is always, in his own centre of light, the same radiant luminary; but his brilliancy is to our eyes greater and lesser, as clouds and vapours come and clear away. From extracts given in the early part of this article, to which others from less suspicious sources might have been added, it is evident that certain parties confidently expected that some great schism, not only from the Church but in the Church, would arise out of the Council. But the mutterings that seemed to prelude the coming tempest, came only from the lips of the false prophets, and, having received no responsive echo from the vaunted ranks of disaffection, they at first died away in silent and black despair, to break out again, from time to time, in fitful bursts of rage and malediction. The victory of faith, of faith which overcometh the world, is complete and perfect, as was the victory of Michael over the dragon. It turns out that out of about ninety Bishops who were opposed to the defining of the Papal infallibility, not half a dozen were opposed to the doctrine: the rest were opposed, not to the doctrine, which they believed firmly, but to the definition of it; and this on the sole ground of the inexpediency, or, as it was termed, inopportuneness of that definition. Mgr. Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans, was held up as one of the leading members of the French opposition, as he undoubtedly was. In a pastoral* recently addressed by him to his clergy, he says: "In my letter of adhesion addressed to the Holy Father from Bordeaux, I reminded His Holiness that, if I had written and spoken against the opportuneness of the definition, as to the doctrine itself, I had always professed it, not only in my heart, but in my public writings." But whatever may be said on this point, one great fact is now clear to the whole world. The Bishops of the opposition, whether opposed to the definition itself or to the expediency of it, the Bishops of the whole Church, without even one solitary exception, have submitted to the definition. The lie, like the mark of Cain, is branded on the forehead of the liar. "The internal divisions which rent asunder the unity of the Roman Catholic system from its summit to its base," were but thin mists floating around the Holy Mountain. They have passed away and from the summit to the base of that Mountain there is neither chasm nor mark of chasm. Through all the Church there is unity of faith-unity perfect and indestructible-as has been ever, as shall be ever, all days, even to the consummation of the world. Every day, from every clime, one glorious Credo arises to the throne of God; harmonious as the chant sent forth from all creation, in the first exulting dawn of its being, "when the morning stars praised Me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody." Such was the Vatican Council from its commencement to the final absorption, so to speak, of its work into the Church's system. Let us now turn to a consideration of the work itself -always bearing in mind that that work is yet unfinished. We should have a most inadequate idea of the achievements of the Council of Trent if we formed a judgment only from its two first dogmatic decrees, important as these decrees are. As the Council of Trent differed in many striking features from all the Councils that preceded it, so the Vatican Council differs in many striking features from the Council of Trent. Both were alike called into existence by the aggressions of the great Protestant heresy, or rather the enormous swarm of heresies comprised in the name of Protestantism; the earlier Council against Protestantism as it existed at that time; the later as it exists in our time. In an article in our number for * A translation of which is given in extenso in the. "Irish Ecclesiastical Record" for last August, |