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Rh tionalities. What individuals have never been able to effect against the unity and authority of the Church, nations have endeavoured to do. And no more luminous evidence can be found of the divine stability of the Church, both in its unity and its authority, than that it should have been able not only to heal the great Western schism, but for four hundred years to preserve both unity and authority as it is at this day, and that, too, in the period of the most vigorous and vehement development of modern nationalities.

But to return to the thread of our subject. It is certain that the opinions of Gerson soon lost their hold, even in the Sorbonne. The Council of Florence eighteen years afterwards, that is in 1439, effaced the traces of the fourth and fifth sessions of the Council of Constance by its well-known decree, which, if it does not explicitly affirm the infallibility of the See and of the Successor of Peter, implicitly and logically contains it. That well-known decree is no more than the final expression of the immemorial and universal practice and faith of the Church by the infallible authority of a General Council.

Forty years later, that is in 1479, the condemnation of Peter de Osma by Sixtus IV. affirms the contrary of his error to be of faith, namely, 'that the Church of the City of Rome cannot err.'

In 1544 the Faculty of Louvain published two-and-thirty Articles against the errors of Luther. The twenty-first runs thus:—

'It is to be held by firm faith that there is one true and Catholic Church on earth, and that visible,