the Immaculate Conception, it would be met by universal acceptance. The same prophets in sackcloth prophesied unbelief, contention and schism, before the Immaculate Conception was defined. We were then told that there was not a trace of it in antiquity; that the Fathers were against it; that Schoolmen and Saints denied it; that to define it would separate the Church of to-day from the Church of the past, remove faith from the broad tradition of the Christian world to the airy basis of the Pope's authority, draw narrower the conditions of communion by adding a new test, and fatally divide the 'Latin Church.' The answer is before men's eyes. Nevertheless, we have volumes of matter, undigested and misunderstood, from Fathers and Schoolmen, published and republished, without a trace of consciousness that a complete exposure of all this incoherence has again and again been made. The same is now the prophecy as to the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff. There is no trace of it in antiquity; the Fathers knew nothing of it; the Schoolmen are against it; the Saints ignore it; the Councils exclude the notion of it; the tradition of thirteen hundred years refutes it; the adulation and ambition, the ignorance and the servility of the Roman Curia have invented a novelty which all the independent, learned, and noble-minded of all countries have, with irresistible logic and surpassing erudition, in vain resisted. We are told that this novelty is all that is now wanting to narrow the Roman Church to its Latin dimensions; that its definition will at once exclude all the independent, learned, and noble minds lingering and suffering
