Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/225

 ] in the coming Council. No conflict of opinions would be there; nor any parties, as in a political assembly.

Döllinger, as Janus shows, was the victim of no illusions as to the main purpose to which the Vatican Council would be directed. Whatever impressions might exist in France or elsewhere, the student of History did not misinterpret the steady direction of events, the persistent intention of the dominant influences in the Church. And, although permitted no official work among the theologian consultors of the Council, he placed at the disposal of the Bishops the conclusions of his historical learning, in his Considerations respecting the question of Papal Infallibility.

Döllinger insisted that the principle by which the Church had been hitherto controlled in matters of faith was the principle of immutability. To demonstrate that a doctrine was not the conviction of the entire Church, that it was not logically included as an undeniable sequence in the original Deposit of Revealed Truth, was hitherto regarded as a conclusive demonstration that such doctrine could never be raised to the dignity of a dogma of the Church. Döllinger contended that on this principle the case for Papal Infallibility was already adversely determined. In the Eastern Church no voice had ever been heard to ascribe dogmatic Infallibility to the Pope. The doctrine did not arise within the West until the thirteenth century. It renders the history of Christendom for the first thousand years an incomprehensible enigma: for history exhibits Christendom toiling by painful, circuitous methods to secure what, if the Popes were infallible, might have been gained in the simplest way, from the utterances of a solitary voice in Rome.