Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/71

Rh affirmed the infallibility of the see. But another analysis was soon to be made into the two elements of the person and the primacy. It was soon perceived that the see is nothing in itself—that it derives all its authority from him who sits in it. The See of Peter is not the material chair, nor is it the collective body of the Church around it, but the successor of Peter, who bears the office of Peter, with the powers and promises attaching to it. Nevertheless, as in the example already given of the Immaculate Conception, centuries passed away while the Immaculate Nativity and the Immaculate Conception were still in discussion, so also centuries passed away while theologians discussed whether the stability or infallibility in faith attached to the person or to the office.

Gradually the opinion of the Old Sorbonne became nearly obsolete, and probably would have become extinct but for the conflict of Louis the Fourteenth against Innocent the Eleventh in the matter of the Regale or royal prerogative in ecclesiastical matters. It was this conflict that gave rise to the Four Articles of 1682 in which the denial of the infallibility of the head of the Church was first reduced to a public formula and propagated by royal and parliamentary edicts. It was no sooner published than it was on all sides condemned—by the University of Louvain, by the theologians of Liége, by the professors of Douai, by