the Pope. With the knowledge I have, in common with a large part of the Episcopate, I am able to give to this a direct denial. But this denial is not given as if the admission of the charge would be in any way inconsistent with the wisdom, dignity, or duty of the Council. It is simply untrue in fact. Even though it were true, I should have no hesitation in undertaking to show that the Council, if it had been assembled chiefly to define the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, would have been acting in strict analogy with the practice of the Church in the eighteen Œcumenical Councils already held.
Each several Council was convened to extinguish the chief heresy, or to correct the chief evil, of the time. And I do not hesitate to affirm that the denial of the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff was the chief intellectual or doctrinal error as to faith, not to call it more than proximate to heresy, of our times.
It was so, because it struck at the certainty of the pontifical acts of the last three hundred years; and weakened the effect of pontifical acts at this day over the intellect and conscience of the faithful. It kept alive a dangerous controversy on the subject of Infallibility altogether, and exposed even the Infallibility of the Church itself to difficulties not easy to solve. As an apparently open or disputable point, close to the very root of faith, it exposed even the faith itself to the reach of doubts.
Next, practically, it was mischievous beyond measure. The divisions and contentions of 'Gallicanism' and 'Ultramontanism' have been a scandal and a
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