Note B to No. 12, chap. ii. p. 67.
The French Editor has here another important note:
'In their Pastoral Instruction, posterior to the work of Mgr. Fessler, and approved, as is known, by Pius IX., the Swiss Bishops cite the following passage of the Constitution of the Vatican Council:
"The Holy Spirit has not been promised to the successors of St. Peter that they might publish according to His revelations a new doctrine, but in order that with His assistance they may holily guard and faith fully set forth the revelation transmitted by the Apostles—that is to say, the deposit of the Faith." And they add: "It is, then, the revelation given by God, the deposit of the Faith, which is the domain perfectly traced out and exactly circumscribed, within which the infallible decisions of the Pope are able to extend themselves, and in regard to which the faith of Catholics can be bound to fresh obligations. … It in no way depends upon the caprice of the Pope, or upon his good pleasure, to make such and such a doctrine the object of a dogmatic definition: he is tied up and limited to the divine revelation, and to the truths which that revelation contains; he is tied up and limited by the Creeds already in existence, and by the preceding definitions of the Church; he is tied up and limited by the Divine law, and by the constitution of the Church; lastly, he is tied up and limited by that doctrine, divinely revealed, which affirms that alongside religious society there is civil society; that alongside the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy there is the power of Temporal Magistrates, invested in their own domain with a full sovereignty, and to whom we owe in conscience obedience and respect in all things morally permitted, and which belong to the domain of civil society."'
