THE VATICAN COUNCIL
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understanding lasted, and while the bishops were engaged in applying the impartial principles of self-government at home, there was a strong security that they would not accept decrees that would undo their work. Infallibility would not only condemn their system, but destroy their position. As the ,vinter advanced the influence of these things became apparent. The ascendency which the Hungarian bishops acquired from the beginning was due to other causes. The political auspices under \vhich the Council opened were very favourable to the papal cause. The promoters of infallibility \vere able to coin resources of the enmity ,vhich was shown to the Church. The danger which came to them frGm within \vas a verted. The policy of Hohenlohe, which ,vas after\vards revived by Daru, had been, for a time, completely abandoned by Europe. The battle between the papal and the episcopal principle could come off undisturbed, in closed lists. Political opposition there ,vas none; but the Council had to be governed under the glare of inevitable publicity, ,vith a free press in Europe, and hostile vie\vs prevalent in Catholic theology. The causes which made religious science utterly powerless in the strife, and kept it from grappling with the forces arrayed against it, are of deeper import than the issue of the contest itself. While the voice of the bishops grew louder in praise of the Roman designs, the Bavarian Government consulted the universities, and elicited from the majority of the Munich faculty an opinion that the dogma of infallibi1ity would be attended with serious danger to society. The author of the Bohemian pamphlet affirmed that it had not the conditions \vhich would enable it ever to become the object of a valid definition. J anus compared the primacy, as it was kno\vn to the Fathers of the Church, \vith the ultramontane ideal, and traced the process of transformation through a long series of forgeries. Maret published his book some weeks after Janus and the Reform. It had been revised by several French bishops and divines, and was to serve as a vindication of the Sorbonne and the Gallicans, and as the manifesto of men
