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 "Exiit qui seminat" that the doctrine of the poverty of Christ was the true doctrine, the denial of which was heresy. Thus if John XXII. was right Nicholas III. was a heretic, and in that case Nicholas's nominations of Cardinals were void, and the conclave which elected John was illegal; so that John was no Pope, his nominations of Cardinals were void, and the whole Papal succession vitiated. On the other hand, if John was wrong—well, he was a heretic; and the same inconvenient results followed. And, in either case, what becomes of Papal Infallibility?

But such crude and fundamental questions as these were not likely to trouble the Council. The discordant minority took another line. Infallibility they admitted readily enough—the infallibility, that is to say, of the Church; what they shrank from was the pronouncement that this infallibility was concentrated in the Bishop of Rome. They would not actually deny that, as a matter of fact, it was so concentrated; but to declare that it was, to make the belief that it was an article of faith—what could be more—it was their favourite expression—more inopportune? In truth, the Gallican spirit still lingered among them. At heart, they hated the autocracy of Rome—the domination of the centralised Italian organisation over the whole vast body of the Church. They secretly hankered, even at this late hour, after some form of constitutional government, and they knew that the last faint vestige of such a dream would vanish utterly with the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope. It did not occur to them, apparently, that a constitutional Catholicism might be a contradiction in terms, and that the Catholic Church without the absolute dominion of the Pope might resemble the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

Pius IX. himself was troubled by no doubts. "Before I was Pope," he observed, "I believed in Papal Infallibility, now I feel it." As for Manning, his certainty was