Page:True and False Infallibility of Popes.pdf/178

Rh suffice to give the names of Gunther, Froschammer, and the unauthorised assembly of divines in Munich of September 1863, which foreshadowed the heretical sect of the Döllingerites. Whilst some of these teachers bowed to correction, others fell back upon the disingenuous tactics of the Jansenists, either to evade the supreme authority or to question it. Irritated against the Holy See for the checks put on their uncatholic teaching, the professors fell back upon the ancestors of their unquiet spirit. They invoked the expiring Gallicanism which the court lawyers and theologians had framed for the use of the Kings of France. They had ancestors in Richard of the Sorbonne, in Drontheim of Treves, better known as Febronius, in Eybel of Vienna, in the Council of Ems and the Synod of Pistoia; all indeed condemned by Rome and reprobated by the Church, but all serviceable to men prepared to with draw themselves from the decisions of the Apostolic Chair. Whatever else they might allow, the infallibility of the authority that condemned them they would not agree to.

The unsound taint was brought to England by certain young laymen, pupils of Dr. Döllinger or others associated with him, and exhibited itself in the later numbers of the Rambler, after it passed into their hands, in the Home and Foreign Review, the North British Review, and the Chronicle. But the Catholics of this country repelled the poison, and these publications dropped rapidly one after another into their grave.

To go back a moment, other errors had arisen in France, chiefly from the pen of the unhappy De la Mennais, errors subversive of the foundations both of