Council is not like a human legislature. It cannot suppress, or soften, or vary, or withhold the truth on calculations of expediency, or with a view to consequences. Necessity is laid upon it. As it has received, so it must declare. Deviation from the truth would be apostacy; silence when truth is denied is betrayal. This is what, it seems, Honorius did, and what some would have had Pius the Ninth do. Truth is not ours, it is of God. We have no jurisdiction against it or over it. Our sole office to truth is to guard it and to declare it. "That which ye have heard in the ear, preach ye on the house tops." For this cause the Council of Trent defined every doctrine which had been unhappily denied or distorted in controversy from the year 1517. It ranged its decrees along the whole line of the Lutheran aberration. Was the Lutheran separation the consequence of the Council of Trent?
15. After the close of the Council of Trent, the separations which were foreseen became complete. Whole kingdoms fell from the unity of the faith. But from that hour the Council of Trent has renewed and governed the Catholic Church. It may be said with truth that as the Council of Nicæa has guarded the faith of the Holy Trinity to this hour, so the Council of Trent has guarded both the doctrines assailed in the sixteenth century, and the discipline
