Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/43

Rh ment of the intention to convoke the Council of the Vatican.

It will be seen that the initiative was altogether by the act of Pius the Ninth. He was the first to conceive and to lay open this thought to his legitimate counsellors. Moreover, we have the declared motive of his thought. It was "to find an extraordinary remedy for the extraordinary evils of the Christian world." We have seen also that in the deliberate answers of the cardinals and of the bishops the same is the governing thought. The evils of the modern world, its theological, philosophical, religious, social, domestic, and moral confusions, these so filled the mind of the Pontiff and his counsellors that what the world has been taught to believe was the chief if not the only motive for holding the Council hardly appears; and when it appears it is either enumerated in a series of doctrines of which each demands the other, or it is suggested by one of the cardinals who opposed the holding of a Council altogether.

The true motive of the Vatican Council is transparent to all calm and just minds. For three hundred years no General Council had been held, for three hundred years the greatest change that has ever come upon the world since its conversion to Christianity had steadily passed upon it. The first period of the Church gradually brought about the union of the