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28 comment may have been made aloud. In a very few instances, and those happily of an exceptional kind, expressions of strong disapproval and of exhausted patience at length escaped. But the descriptions of violence, outcries, menace, denunciation, and even of personal collisions, with which certain newspapers deceived the world, I can affirm to be calumnious falsehoods, fabricated to bring the Council into odium and contempt. That such has been the aim and intent of certain journals and their correspondents is undeniable. They at first endeavoured to write it down; but an Œcumenical Council cannot be written down. Next, they endeavoured to treat it with ridicule; but an Œcumenical Council cannot be made ridiculous. The good sense of the world forbids it. But it may be made odious and hateful; and thereby the minds of men may be not only turned from it, but even turned against it. For this in every way the anti-Catholic world has laboured; and no better plan could be found than to describe its sessions as scenes of indecent clamour and personal violence, unworthy even in laymen, criminal in Bishops of the Church. I have read descriptions of scenes of which I was a personal witness, so absolutely contrary to fact and truth, that I cannot acquit the anonymous writer on the plea of error. The animus was manifest, and its effect has been and will be to poison a multitude of minds which the truth will never reach.

It has been loudly declared, that a tyrannical majority deprived the minority of liberty of discussion.

Now it is hard to believe this allegation to be sincere, for many reasons.