history at its back. The attitude of other great powers is also hitherto dignified and serious, proportionate to great responsibilities. Lesser potentates and their counsellors may circulate notes and resolve questions, and furnish matter for newspapers; but they are not the men to move mountains.
Whilst I was writing these lines a document has appeared purporting to be the answers of the Theological Faculty of Munich to the questions of the Bavarian Government.[1]
The questions and the answers are so evidently concerted, if not written by the same hand, and the animus of the document so evidently hostile to the Holy See, and so visibly intended to create embarrassments for the supreme authority of the Church, both in respect to its past acts and also in respect to the future action of the Œcumenical Council, that I cannot pass it over. But in speaking of it I am compelled, for the first time, to break silence on a danger which has for some years been growing in its proportions, and, I fear I must add, in its attitude of menace. The answers of the University of Munich are visibly intended to excite fear and alarm in the civil powers of Europe, and thereby to obstruct the action of the Œcumenical Council if it should judge it to be opportune to define the Infallibility of the Pope. The answers are also intended to create an impression that the theological proofs of the doctrine are inadequate, and its definition beset with uncertainty and obscurity. In a word, the whole correspondence is a transparent effort to obstruct the free-
- ↑ Times, Sept. 20, 1869.
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