Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/160

148 ever that the supreme authority of the Church as the witness and teacher of Christianity was at stake. The necessity of the definition was once more forced by these facts upon those who for a while hesitated. After this there were in the Council only those who believed the definition to be inopportune, and those who saw it to be necessary.

It has seemed better to reserve until the end of this narrative a subject of which the adversaries of the Catholic Church have endeavoured to avail themselves in their warfare against it—that is, the attitude of a certain number of the bishops towards the decrees and action of the Council. Pomponio Leto, who writes as their friend and partisan, has done them a grievous wrong. His history reads like the history of a Parliamentary opposition. Such the world believed them to be, and tried to make them; but they were Catholic bishops, and the world was disappointed. The Council of the Vatican was held under obstructive and menacing circumstances of a kind to which no council was ever hitherto exposed. The world has opposed all councils, the civil powers have been often either openly or secretly hostile, but down to the Council of Trent, and the Council of Trent also included, no council has been the passive and silent butt against which the tongues and the pens of the world were so unceasingly levelled. The press of