of conciliation: not a via media, which is the essential method of falsehood, but any intellectual analysis and precise mental conception which might satisfy the mind of Mgr. Maret as to the infallibility of the See and of the Successor of Peter. I cannot but add in passing that much confusion seems to me to arise from this whole notion of 'moderate opinions.'
The Pontifical judgments ex cathedrâ must be either fallible or infallible. If it be immoderate or exaggerated to affirm them to be infallible, how is it not equally immoderate or exaggerated to deny their infallibility? Either way the affirmation and the denial are equally absolute, trenchant, and peremptory. I see just as much, and just as little, moderation in the one as in the other. Either both are moderate or neither. And yet those who affirm the Pontifical infallibility are held up as warnings, and they who deny it as examples; the latter as patterns of mode ration, the former as exaggerated and extreme. But they are both in extremes. Aye and no are equally exclusive, and admit of no degrees.
Is it not the truth that moderation is a quality, not of the intellect but of the moral nature? Certainty admits of no degrees. Doubt may; but certainty excludes doubt and all its gradations. To be moderate, cautious, forbearing, self-mistrusting, and considerate of opponents in all doubtful matters, is a virtue; but in matters that are certain, to fail in saying that they are so, is to betray the truth. To treat certainties as uncertainties in mathematics is not intellectual, in revelation is unbelief. The only moderation possible in matters of theological certainty
