Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/212

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The True Story of the Vatican Council.

pendence, as Dr Friedbergh has it, on "the man outside of Germany." But the "Old Catholic" schism was not the consequence of the Vatican Council any more than was Arianism the consequence of the Council of Nicæa. The definitions of the Council were indeed the occasion of the separation of a small number of professors and others from the unity of the Church, whose antecedents had for years visibly prepared for this final separation. The strange medley which met at Augsburg and Bonn and Cologne, of Rationalists and Protestants, and Orientals and Jansenists and Anglicans, was not the consequence of the Vatican Council. Every sect there represented had been for generations or for centuries in separation and in antagonism to the Catholic Church. The Vatican Council may have awakened a sharper consciousness of the cause of their separation, and a handful of such Catholics as composed Janus and Quirinus invoked their help to give the appearance of numbers. Even Pomponio Leto had too much wit to be there.

Before and during and after the Council formidable prophecies of separations to come, sometimes in tones of compassion, sometimes in tones of menace, were heard. And those who were most firm in urging onward the definition of the infallibility were not unconscious of the danger. They remembered that after the Council of Nicæa eighty bishops separated from the unity of