Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/10

vi the principal actors in the Vatican disputes have, by this time, passed away; and a large series of biographies have placed at our disposal private letters never published while they lived.

But it will be obvious that an Ultramontane biographer of a Bishop who vehemently opposed the doctrine may be gravely perplexed between the conflicting claims of history and of edification. His loyalty to truth, his reverence for the personage of whom he writes, his regard for living authority, with its tremendous powers to revise, cancel, or condemn, his proper disinclination to scandalise the faithful by rigorous records of episcopal unbelief, or to reveal the family disunions before an incredulous world—are elements which, when they coexist, may, even in the sincerest mind possibly blend together in very various proportions. At any rate the biographies of certain great French Bishops of the Vatican struggle manifest marked reluctance and hesitation in recording fully the facts. And even when the facts have been fairly fully recorded, the English translator has—for whatever reasons—condensed them, we had almost said mutilated them, beyond recognition.

The recently published selection of Lord Acton's letters has increased our knowledge of his attitude toward the Infallibility Decree; but the entire omission of correspondence during ten most critical years of the struggle suggests, what other considerations endorse, that there is yet considerably more remaining unrevealed.

Still, with whatever drawbacks, the resources at a writer's disposal to-day are vastly greater than they were some years ago.