Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/56

 by prescriptions, the painful minuteness of which is conclusively illustrating of the spirit of formalism pervading the whole system. For each of the nine preliminary days there is an enjoined assembly of Cardinals that is limited to go through the form of some minutely prescribed bit of ceremonial mechanism, not to be departed from, not to be exceeded, not to be innovated upon. Every attribute of these assemblies is rigidly fixed and circumscribed. Here we have the unmistakable impress of generations of jealous Popes, who have been assiduously at work in hammering out a system into such elaborately thin points as cannot he twisted into shapes that might prove dangerous to the perfect absoluteness which Popes will allow to reside only in themselves. 'During the vacation of the See,' says Pius IV., in a Bull that is inserted in the latest collection of regulations in force during an interregnum, 'in those things which appertained to the Pope when alive, the College of Cardinals can have no power or jurisdiction whatever, whether of grace or justice, or of giving execution to such resolutions of the