ters than in their differences of expression. Each of them is saturated with his profession. His lawyers speak in terms of the pleas and bench; his divines in those of the pulpit and the schools; and his nobles are all heralds. All are vexed with an itch of making metaphors corresponding to the circumstances of their lives. Hence the style is rather a pudding-stone of dialects, all formed on the same principle, but out of different materials, than a smooth amalgam in which all the materials are made fluid, and worked up into the one comprehensive and dignified language of the cultivated man. There is enough of observation, learning, humour, wit, wisdom, but little charm; "nihil hic nisi carmina desunt." Yet there is more to admire than to forgive in Mr. Browning. Like Plato he is a poet because he is a poetical philosopher, though it may be a question whether his philosophy does not tend to strangle his poetry. His power may be guessed by the opposition he has encountered. Smashers clip gold, not copper. But to some his very power is repulsive. There are still many wise men, and men of taste, who would have their teeth drawn or toes amputated rather than read him. And those who can appreciate him are often so struck with the multifariousness of his merits in detail that, without appraising him higher than he deserves, they are apt in criticising him to raise expectations which the reading of his poems will fail to satisfy.

ART. V.-THE POPE AND THE COUNCIL.*

[COMMUNICATED.]

THE attempt to establish the infallibility of the Pope by decree of a General Council is a phase of controversy which the internal disputes of the Church of Rome have made almost inevitable. The Catholic opposition in its several forms, national in Italy, scientific in Germany, liberal in France, has uniformly been directed against one or other of the Papal claims. Amongst the Catholics there are numbers who earnestly condemn the despotism of the Popes, their asserted superiority to all human law, civil and ecclesiastical, the exclusiveness with which they profess themselves sole interpreters of the Divine law, their systematic warfare against freedom of conscience, of science,

* Der Papst und das Concil. Von Janus. (Leipzig: Steinacker.)

and of speech. These men find the arms of their adversaries effectually strengthened by the Papacy, and their own efforts confounded by reproaches which it justifies; but they seldom acknowledge that the causes of their weakness are in Rome. Sooner or later they almost always renounce or silence their convictions. Rather than definitely contradict the utterances of the Pope, or publicly censure his acts, they devote themselves to force or to veil his meaning. They shrink from a direct antagonism, and refuse to let the cause of the Pope be separated from their own. Their dread of a collision, and their obtrusive submissiveness, encourage the enterprise of those whose desire is to promote the Papal authority. Men who succumb in order to avoid the Index cannot be expected to reject what is proposed as an article of faith. If they will not resist a Roman congregation acting in the name of the Pope, they are not likely to resist an oecumenical council claiming to represent the Church. It is thought at Rome that, by declaring the Pope infallible, the independent action of the liberal party may be arrested, and the troubles of internal discussion averted for the future.

This infallibility is already a received doctrine with a considerable fraction of the Catholics. In the Commission to which the question was submitted at Rome, in prepara tion for the Council, only one dissentient vote was given. Among the Jesuits it has long prevailed; and the Jesuits being now in power, and recognised exponents of the Pope's own sentiments, the moment is propitious to make their doctrine triumph. For the ideas of the Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864, by which Pius IX. desired to remodel society, have not commanded general assent. The mind of Europe moves in other orbits; and nation after nation breaks away from the fetters of the canon law. It is hoped that the Pope's words will be heard with more deference if they are enforced by severer penalties. Obedience or munication would be a formidable alternative to the Catholics. The calculation is that it may yet be possible to recover by authority what has not been preserved by reason, and to restore, at one stroke, an influence which is waning, and a spirit that has passed away.

There is no doubt that

excom

many of the bishops will be glad if the dogma of infallibility is not submitted to the Council. A book by a French prelate is announced to appear shortly, which proves that the authority and example of Bossuet are not lost upon his countrymen. The German bishops, meeting at Fulda the other day, agreed that

On the

It will not be easy for the opposition to prevent the decree. In various ways the bishops are already largely committed. Since the revival of Provincial Synods, their acts have been sent to Rome for approval; and many of them have asserted their belief in the Papal infallibility. In 1854 the episcopate allowed the Pope to proclaim a new dogma to the Church. In 1862 they almost unanimously pronounced in favour of the temporal power. In 1864 they accepted the Syllabus. In 1867 they assured the Pope that they were ready to believe whatever he should teach. At that time the intention to summon a General Council, and the purpose of the summons, were no secret; and the bishops knew that their address would not be received if it expressed their obedience in less explicit terms. They will now be required to redeem their pledges. The most sanguine opponent can hardly expect, if the Council meets, that the dogma will not be proposed, or that it will be rejected in principle, or on any higher ground than that of present expediency. Its rejection, so qualified, might easily be represented as implicit acceptance of the principle, leaving the question of time to the judgment of the Pope. It will probably appear that the question of expediency is the only one which will be fairly submit ted to be affirmed or negatived by the Council. The managers consider that the doctrine itself is virtually decided, and that only those who believe it are real Catholics. Their object will be gained if the assembled episcopate confirms their opinion by tacit acquiescence, while it determines whether a formal decree is opportune.

No charge is more strenuously repelled by intelligent Catholics than that their faith is subject to be changed at will by the authorities of their Church, and that they may be called upon to believe to-morrow what they deny to-day. Their position in this respect is becoming critical. It is manifestly possi

An answer to it has at length been given, and given with such force and distinctness that it cannot be forgotten or recalled. A volume has appeared at Leipzig, on the competence of the Council and the infallibility of the Pope, which will complete that revolution in Catholic divinity, and in the conditions of religious controversy, which was begun by Möhler's treatment of the claim to indefectibility, and by Newman's theory of the development of doctrine. The argument of the book, sustained by a portentous chain of evidence, is briefly this:-The Christian Fathers not only teach that the Pope is fallible, but deny him the right of deciding dogmatic questions without a Council. In the first four centuries there is no trace of a dogmatic decree proceeding from a Pope. Great controversies were fought out and settled without the participation of the Popes; their opinion was sometimes given and rejected by the Church; and no point of doctrine was finally decided by them in the first ten centuries of Christianity. They did not convene the General Councils; they presided over them in two instances only; they did not confirm their acts. Among all the ancient heretics there is not one who was blamed because he had fallen away from the faith of Rome. Great doctrinal errors have been sometimes accepted, and sometimes originated, by Popes; and, when a Pope was condemned for heresy by a General Council, the sentence was admitted without protest by his successors. Several Churches of undisputed orthodoxy held no intercourse with the See of Rome. Those passages of Scripture which are used to prove that it is infallible, are not so interpreted by the Fathers. They all, eighteen in number, explain the prayer of Christ for Peter, without reference to the Pope. Not one of them believes that the Papacy is the rock on which He built His Church. Every Catholic priest binds himself by oath never to interpret Scripture in contradiction to the Fathers; and if, defying the unanimous testimony of antiquity, he makes these passages authority for Papal infallibility, he breaks his oath.

So far the book only asserts more defi

claims arose.

nitely, and with deeper learning, facts which were already known. The great problem is to explain how it came to pass that the ancient constitution of the Church was swept away, and another system substituted, contrary to it in principle, in spirit, and in action, and by what gradations the present The history of this transformation is the great achievement of the book. Each step in the process, prolonged through centuries, is ascertained and accounted for; and nothing is left obscure where the greater part was till now unknown. The passage from the Catholicism of the Fathers to that of the modern Popes was accomplished by wilful falsehood; and the whole structure of traditions, laws, and doctrines that support the theory of infallibility, and the practical despotism of the Popes, stands on a basis of fraud.

The great change began in the middle of the ninth century, with a forgery which struck root so deep that its consequences survive, though it has been discovered and exposed for three centuries. About one hundred decretals of carly pontiffs, with acts of Councils and passages from the Fathers, were composed and published in France. The object of their author was to liberate the bishops from the authority of metropolitans and of the civil government, by exalting the power of the Pope, in whom he represented all ecclesiastical authority as concentrated. He placed the final criterion of orthodoxy in the word of the Pope, and taught that Rome would always be true to the faith, and that the acts of Councils were inoperative and invalid without Papal confirmation. The effect was not what he intended. At Rome the ground had long been prepared by interpolations in St. Cyprian, and by the fictitious biographies of early Popes which bear the name of Anastasius; and the advantage supplied by the Frankish prelate was eagerly seized. Nicolas 1. declared that the originals of these texts were preserved in the Papal archives; and the bishops found themselves reduced to the position of dependants and delegates of the Pope. When Gregory vII. undertook to impose his new system of government on the Church, he, as well as the able and unscrupulous men who helped him, made all available use of pseudo-Isidore, and added such further fictions and interpolations as the new claims required. These accumulated forgeries, with more of his own making, were inserted by Gratian in the compilation which became the text-book of canon law. The exposure of the devices by which the Gregorian system obtained acceptance, and a spurious code supplanted the authentic law

of the Church, is the most brilliant and the newest thing in the volume.

The Councils became passive instruments in the hands of the Pope, and silently registered his decrees at the General Council of Vienne. Clement v. stated that he summoned only a few selected prelates, and informed them that whoever dared to speak, without being called on by the Pope, incurred excommunication. The Papal absolutisin was practically established when it was forced on the divines by the same arts. A series of forged passages from the Greek Fathers came into existence, by which it appeared that the Pope was recognised as infallible by the Eastern Church in the fourth century. Urban IV. communicated them to St. Thomas Aquinas, who constructed the doctrine, as it afterwards flourished, on the proofs thus supplied. He was deceived by the invention of a false tradition; and his great name spread and estab. lished the delusion. At length men became aware that the decay of religion and the lamentable evils and abuses in the Church were caused by the usurpations of Rome. At Constance it was proclaimed that the supreme legislative and judicial authority, and the last appeal in matters of faith, belonged to the Council; and thus the belief and discipline of the Church were restored to what they had been before the forgeries began. The decrees were accepted by the Pope and by succeeding Councils; but it was a transitory reform. In the conflict with Protestantism the notion of unbounded power and unfailing orthodoxy was wrought up to the highest pitch at Rome. Cardinal Cajetan called the Church the slave of the Pope. Innocent iv. had declared that every priest was bound to obey him, even in unjust things; and Bellarmine asserted that if a Pope should prescribe vice and prohibit virtue, the Church must believe him. "Si autem papa erraret præcipiendo vitia, vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes mala, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare." Gre gory VII. had claimed to inherit the sanctity as well as the faith of Peter; and Innocent x. professed that God had made the Scriptures clear to him, and that he felt himself inspired from above. The present volume traces the progress of the theory, and its influence on religion and society, down to the sixteenth century, and shows with careful detail how much it contributed to the schism of the East, to the divisions of Western Christendom, to the corruption of morality, the aggravation of tyranny, and the fanatical persecution of witchcraft and heresy, and how the only hope of Christian