just severity. In these clays, laxity is mistaken for charity, and indifference to truth for love of souls. This is not the spirit of the Apostle, who in the excess of charity declared that he could desire ' to be anathema from Christ' for his brethren according to the flesh, and yet for the love of souls could say, 'I would they were even cut off, who trouble you;'[1] because the purity of the faith is vital to the salvation of souls, and the salvation of the flock must be preferred to the salvation of a few.
I will touch but one other topic, and then make an end. The same prophets who foretold disastrous consequences from the definition, are now foretelling the downfall of the Temporal Power. Day by day, we hear and read contemptuous censures of the obstinacy of Pius the Ninth, who has ruined himself by his Non possumus, and sealed his downfall by the definition of his own infallibility. I do not hesitate to say, that if what is now happening had been caused by the definition, which is not the fact, yet any external trials would be better than an internal conflict arising from a contradiction of revealed truth. Gold may be bought too dear: but truth cannot.
Perhaps we ought not to wonder that the Protestant and anti-Catholic world should persist in declaring that Rome, by the definition of the Infallibility, has altered its relations to the world; or, as I have lately read, 'disgusted all the civil governments of Europe.' They do not know, or are willingly ignorant, that the doctrine of the Infallibility was as as much the doctrine of the Church before as after the definition. The
- ↑ Gal. v. 12.
