school except one, and in that one disputed only by a minority in number, and during one period of its history; believed, at least implicitly, by all the faithful, and therefore attested by the passive infallibility of the Church in all ages and lands, with the partial and transient limitations already expressed.
The doctrine was therefore already objectively de fide, and also subjectively binding in conscience upon all who knew it to be revealed.
The definition has added nothing to its intrinsic certainty, for this is derived from Divine revelation.
It has added only the extrinsic certainty of universal promulgation by the Ecclesia docens, imposing obligation upon all the faithful.
Hitherto, therefore, the authors of Janus, and the like, who appealed to scientific history, appealed indeed from the doctrinal authority of the Church in a matter of revelation; but they may be, so far as God knows their good faith, protected by the plea that the doctrine had not yet been promulgated by a definition.
Nevertheless, the process of their opposition was essentially heretical. It was an appeal from the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, delivered by its common and constant teaching, to history interpreted by themselves.
It does not at all diminish the gravity of this act to say that the appeal was not to mere human history, nor to history written by enemies, but to the acts of Councils, and to the documents of Ecclesiastical tradition.
This makes the opposition more formal; for it
