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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

Council depended on the settlement of this question; and they proposed to add that they could not continue to act as though it were legitimate unless this point I \vas given up. The author of the address declined this passage, urging that the time for actual menace was not yet come. From that day the minority agreed in reject- ing as invalid any doctrine \vhich should not be passed by unanimous consent. On this point the difference between the thorough and the simulated opposition was effaced, for Ginoulhiac and Ketteler were as positive as Kenrick or Refele. But it \vas a point which Rome could not surrender without giving up its \vhole position. To wait for unanimity \vas to wait for ever, and to admit that a minority could prevent or nullify the dogmatic action of the papacy was to renounce infal1ibility. No alternative remained to the opposing bishops but to break up the Council. The most enlinent among them accepted this conclusion, and stated it in a paper declaring that the absolute and indisputable law of the Church had been violated by the Regulation allowing articles of faith to be decreed on which the episcopate was not morally unanimous; and that the Council, no longer possessing in the eyes of the bishops and of the world the indispens- able condition of liberty and legality, would be inevitably rejected. To avert a public scandal, and to save the honour of the Holy See, it was proposed that some unopposed decrees should be proclaimed in solemn session, and the Council immediately prorogued. A t the end of March a breach seemed unavoidable. The first part of the dogmatic decree had come back from the Commission so profoundly altered that it was generally accepted by the bishops, but with a crudely expressed sentence in the preamble, which was intended to rebuke the notion of the reunion of Protestant Churches. Several bishops looked upon this passage as an uncalled- for insult to Protestants, and wished it changed; but there \vas danger that if they then joined in voting the decree they \vould commit themselves to the lawfulness of the Regulation against which they had protested. On