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ART. V.-1. Letters from Rome on the Council. Reprinted from the Allgemeine Zeitung.'

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QUIRINUS.
Authorised Translation. London: 1870.

2. The Vatican Council and its Definitions. A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy. By HENRY EDWARD, Archbishop of Westminster. London: 1871.

3. Erklärung an den Erzbischof von München-Freysing. By Professor DÖLLINGER. Munich: 1871.

4. Appel aux Evêques catholiques. By the Père HYACINTHE.

1871.

5. Documenta ad illustrandum Concilium Vaticanum Anni 1871. Edited by Professor FRIEDRICH. 1871.

THE

HE 8th of December, 1869, will be a day long remembered in the annals of the Roman Church. It was the opening of the First Council of the Vatican. The external aspect of the city was overcast by the unusual severity of the winter, and the incessant deluge of rain which seemed to recall the second ode of Horace. The yellow Tiber rose, retortis undis,' over the recently discovered quays, and heaven and earth seemed to meet in one black cloud. But inside the great Basilica the splendour of the scene was such as can well be conceived by anyone who has witnessed the Pontifical functions of the Sovereign in St. Peter's. We can all of us imagine the long succession of prelates, clothed in the white robes worn in honour of the Immaculate Conception, whose singular anniversary they were thus studiously made to commemorate. We are thrilled with the vast roll, as of a troubled sea, of the innumerable multitude which filled even that enormous area. We can figure to ourselves the venerable Pontiff Prince, seated on his exalted throne, at the end of the Council-hall, which had been constructed out of the north transept of St. Peter's; the Cardinals in scarlet, on their crimson benches, on his right hand and his left; the pseudo-patriarchs from the barbaric East, in their gorgeous attire, beneath his feet; the archbishops, bishops, and abbots according to their precedence ranged along the hall, to the point where it opened on the vast church itself; the galleries on either side filled with the diplomatic, legal, and theological assistants; and the crowned heads,' (or rather, as a high Roman ecclesiastic wittily observed, the discrowned heads"), for the first time in the history of Councils, relegated from their places on the floor of the house and in the passion of

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debate to the attitude of dumb inactive spectators. On the walls of the chamber were hung pictures of the Councils of Jerusalem, Nicæa, Ephesus, and Trent, so contrived as to raise, regardless of all historical truth, the Pope or his supposed representatives to the highest pitch-Peter, instead of James, the foremost figure at Jerusalem; Sylvester or his legates, instead of Constantine, Hosius, and Eusebius, the leading figures at Nicæa. Round the lofty cornice ran the inscription: 'I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail ' not,' on which was based, regardless equally of all Biblical science and of all Patristic interpretation, the infallibility of the modern Pope. Human ambition has rarely reached a higher point than that which must have swelled the breast of the aged Pontiff, as he thus saw the wish of many years fulfilled, and the representatives of his Church gathered from all parts of the world to bestow upon him the proudest attribute that mortal man ever claimed.

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Nor was this outward impression materially altered, if from the opening of the Council we pass to its close. The elements, indeed, again frowned on the assembled Fathers. Of the last, as of the first day, it was remarked that they were the two darkest and most depressing days that Rome witnessed during the whole of that eventful year. After a long unclouded blaze of the Roman summer sun, continuing for the last weeks of June and the first weeks of July, the windows of heaven were again opened, and the rain descended in such torrents that the promised illumination was of necessity suspended, and the Roman populace could hardly make its way to the Basilica. The thunder pealed and the lightning flickered round the hall, drowning the voices and distracting the attention of those who, one after another, shouted 'placet,' whilst each thunder peal and each lightning flash seemed to announce the response. So dense was the darkness after the voting was concluded, that a huge taper had to be placed by the Pope's side, to enable him to read the decree of his own infallibility. To many, no doubt, this lowering of the heavens might have naturally seemed a sign of the Divine displeasure at this culminating act of folly and superstition. Yet to its adherents the Pope might well be regarded at that moment as a second Moses declaring the last revelation amidst the thunderings and lightnings and thick darkness of a second Sinai. And if the ardour of the promiscuous crowd was quenched by the violence of the tempest, if the diplomatic galleries were empty, by virtue of the prudent abstinence of the European courts from giving even the slightest sanction to an act which all had deprecated—on the

other hand, the apparent unanimity of the Prelates (two only, and they of the most insignificant* sees and the most insignificant character, protesting against the five hundred and thirtythree of the subservient majority) gave to the event at least the semblance of that catholic assent which the Papal party had always desired, and which the Pontiff himself had been led to expect.A more effective scene,' says an eye-witness, 'I never beheld. Had all the decorators in Rome been 'employed, nothing approaching to the solemn splendour of 'the storm could have been prepared, and never will those who saw it and felt it forget the promulgation of the first 'dogma of the Church.'

Such was the external spectacle which alone met the eye of the faithful during the public sessions of the Council. It may well be believed that there were many to whom on the spot this dazzling pageant occupied the whole horizon. It is said, indeed, that even for months before the opening of the Council it was almost impossible to divert the attention of the Chief Person concerned from the questions of dresses, of scaffolding, and of processions to the gravity of the consequences in which it was probable that the Church itself might be placed. It may, however, be pardoned to those who from a distance can take a more impartial view of the whole transaction, to act the part of the slave in the ancient Roman triumph, and to whisper in the ear of this seemingly more than Capitolian conqueror the warning of his mortal frailty. The things which 'were seen' were splendid, but they were transitory; the 'things which were not seen' on the outward surface belonged to the eternal' interests of Christianity and of mankind. It is on these that we desire to fix the attention of our readers, whether in the light of the inner history of the Assembly itself, or of the portentous year which has succeeded to it.

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I. It is not our intention to pry into the secrets' of the Council. Not only is the information on this subject necessarily imperfect, and waiting for the powers and knowledge of a Sarpi to sift, classify, and reproduce, but the larger part of it, even if correct, belongs to that most fugitive and worthless kind of historical study-the narrative of intrigues and counter-intrigues, plots about nothing, personal recriminations and contradictions. They may be necessary to the materials of history; they are not history itself. But there is a

The two protesting bishops were Ricci of Cajazzo, and Fitzgerald of Little Rock. It was impossible for the wits of the Papal Court to resist the remark that the Little Rock had set himself up in vain against the Great Rock of Peter.

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general result at once incontestible and full of instruction. In the record of facts which no one doubts, the story of the Vatican Council has revealed to the public gaze the internal divisions which rend asunder the unity of the Roman Catholic Church from its summit to its base. A foreign Catholic theologian of great eminence addressed to an English Protestant divine, on his way to Rome in the autumn of 1869, the well-known words with which Lucretius congratulates those who from a safe position enjoy the pleasure of watching troubles not their own, suave mari magno,' &c. His speech was as true as it was generous and candid. For once the distractions and variations of Protestantism shrank into insignificance before the wider chasms which yawned between the contending sections of Roman Catholic Christendom. There was, before the Council began, an apprehension or a hope that these divisions would be concealed by the inherent difficulties of the language used, and by the exclusion of the public from the Council Chamber. And no doubt to a great extent these expectations were realised. No authentic report of the speeches was ever published. Publicity, the one indispensable guarantee of the freedom and the value of discussion (as we ventured to remark before the Council opened), was carefully prohibited. The acoustics of the hall were confessedly in the highest degree defective. The pronunciation, not to speak of the understanding, of Latin in many instances was no small difficulty in such a mass of heterogeneous nationalities. The restrictions on the delivery of speeches rendered a debate, in the common sense of the word, almost impossible. These were, no doubt, serious drawbacks in the way of regarding the proceedings of the Council as an adequate expression of the intelligence even of those who were present. But still the fact that they were foreseen led in some degree to their being surmounted. The debate in fact opened before the Council began. Each leading prelate, as he left his diocese, perhaps in anticipation of these very obstacles, fired off in parting a manifesto of his sentiments. The Catholic journals in all parts of Europe joined in the fray. And this combat not behind, but before, the scenes, was continued more or less through the whole Council. Letters from the contending prelates, published-especially on the side of the minority-in foreign countries, were constantly appearing. Speeches, sometimes those which had been delivered, sometimes those which had been intended to be delivered, were printed and circulated. Laymen, distinguished by rank or by intelligence, became in Rome the centres of the opposing camps. The watchwords of

Fallibilist and Infallibilist became as definite, as well recognised, as Protestant and Catholic. The several nations of the Old and New World fell into the ranks of one or other of the two parties. The Italian bishops, the Spanish bishops, and the English bishops were on one side. Most of the German and half of the French were on the other. The Bishop of Laval denounced the Bishop of Orleans as the centre of a conspiracy too shameful to be expressed in words. The Bishop of Orleans not only attacked directly his brothers of Malines and Westminster, but launched his thunderbolts against the chief organs of the Papal Court-the Civiltà Cattolica' and the Univers.' If we can imagine such a thing as a pastoral addressed by the late Bishop Philpotts to the editor of the 'Record,' we can form some notion of the virulence of attack and defence between the hostile representatives of French Catholicism.

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Nor was it possible for any precautions of the Papal Court to hide altogether from public view the scenes* which took place at Rome, in or out of the Council Chamber. There was the violent outbreak in the hall when Strossmeyer ventured to defend such Protestants as Leibnitz and Guizot, when the tumult became so loud that the servants of the bishops who stood outside the church drew their swords to defend their masters within; when an American bishop said of himself, not without a touch of patriotic pride, that he knew now one assembly rougher than the Congress of his own country.† There were the ungenerous insults heaped on the memory of the devoted champion of the Church-Montalembert; the angry taunts with which the Pope announced his death in one of his solemn audiences; the prohibition of the funeral service, to which as a Roman patrician he was entitled, in the Church of Ara Coli; followed by the permission reluctantly extorted to celebrate mass in an obscure church at a time when no one could attend, for the soul of a certain Charles' (uno certo Carlo'). There was the storm of reproaches against the Latin patriarch of Chaldea, who succumbed from mere terror, and his three associates who, with true Oriental cunning, evaded the necessity of answer by feigning first ignorance which covered their absolute silence, and then illness which covered their absence. There were the repeated complaints of French bishops, who spoke of the reproduction before their eyes of the robber synod of Ephesus-the ludibrium

* The Letters of Quirinus, passim, and the article on 'the Vatican Council,' in the North British Review, No cv.

+ Ibid.

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