In its active infallibility it is secured from error, whether dispersed, as it is always, throughout the world, or congregated, as it rarely is, in Council. Only eighteen times in eighteen hundred years has it met in Council; but through all those eighteen centuries its active infallibility has been, not intermittent but continuous, both in its Episcopate with its Head, and in its Head as Universal Pastor and Teacher, both of pastors and flock.
The stability, indefectibility, or infallibility of the faith of Peter are three modes of expressing the same Divine fact.
If this be monarchy pure, indivisible, and absolute, then I fear I must come under the author's censure, though I cannot admit its justice or understand its terms. If Mgr. Maret does not intend to condemn this, then, I think, I will even hope that his learned mind has suffered some illusion, perhaps arising from a want of precision in some who are opponents, and from a want of chastened language in those who are about him. I most sincerely and ardently share in his desire to see all divergences corrected in the enunciation of truth, pure, clear, and lucid as the river of the water of life. I have consciously no thought in my heart but to promote this unity of mind and will; and in what I have written, if there be a word to wound save where truth compels it, I hereby record my desire to blot it out.
Stability signifies the immovable firmness of the Faith in standing against all assaults of power and force: indefectibility, the imperishable vitality and light of faith, which can never fail: infallibility,
