this one question of opportuneness, there was not in the Council of the Vatican a difference of any gravity, and certainly no difference whatsoever on any doctrine of faith. I have never been able to hear of five Bishops who denied the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Almost all previous Councils were distracted by divisions, if not by heresy. Here no heresy existed. The question of opportunity was altogether subordinate and free. It may truly be affirmed that never was there a greater unanimity than in the Vatican Council. Of this the world had a first evidence in the unanimous vote by which the first Constitution on Faith was affirmed on the 24th of April.
I should hardly have spoken of the outward conduct of the Council, if I had not seen, with surprise and indignation, statements purporting to be descriptions of scenes of violence and disorder in the course of its discussions. Having from my earliest remembrance been a witness of public assemblies of all kinds, and especially of those among ourselves, which for gravity and dignity are supposed to exceed all others, I am able and bound to say that I have never seen such calmness, self-respect, mutual forbearance, courtesy and self-control, as in the eighty-nine sessions of the Vatican Council. In a period of nine months, the Cardinal President was compelled to recall the speakers to order perhaps twelve or fourteen times. In any other assembly they would have been inexorably recalled to the question sevenfold oftener and sooner. Nothing could exceed the consideration and respect with which this duty was discharged. Occasionally murmurs of dissent were audible; now and then a
