Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/201

Rh simple. Ask no one but the author of the act. Half the controversies and nearly all the pretentious censures of the Vatican Council, if men would take this course, would die of inanition.

10. There are only two other points to be touched upon in this narrative. But they are too important to be passed over in silence.

The one is that in the end of the definition it is affirmed that the doctrinal declarations of the Pontiff are infallible in and of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church. That is to say, they are infallible by divine assistance, and not by the assent or acceptance of the Church to which they are addressed. Or, more simply, the teacher is not infallible because the taught believe his teaching. They believe his teaching to be true because they believe their teacher to be infallible. The motive for these words is obvious. They were the critical difference between what must be called once more by names which now have lost both meaning and reality, the Ultramontane and the Gallican doctrines. They are taken textually from the Four Articles of 1682.

A moment's reflection will justify the definition.

If the certainty of the teaching depends upon the assent of the taught, what becomes of the teacher?