Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/278

 258 against the minority: "what they labelled inopportune they have rendered inevitable." He identified himself with the irritating assertion that the responsibility for the definition was due to its opponents. Of that, he said, he had not the slightest doubt. He was now to influence the Council itself. To whom could the task of introducing the pontifical claims into the Council be better intrusted than to him? An Infallibilist who had not signed the petition for Infallibility would be more calculated to disarm opposition. The Bishop's friends in France were enchanted. An episcopal colleague just returning from Lourdes wrote to him enthusiastically in terms redolent of the ardent piety of that place: "The Pope has said to Mary, You are immaculate. And now Mary answers the Pope, And you are infallible."

The Bishop of Poitiers set about his speech. He walked with Pius IX. himself in the gardens of the Vatican. He spent much time in serious discussion with the Jesuit theologians Schrader and Franzelin. Such were the influences at work upon his imagination. It was a delicate task, as his Ultramontane biographer justly observes, to introduce such a subject before an Assembly so divided. To do it to the satisfaction of the opposing extremes was of course impossible. The speech of an hour and five minutes, in which this great theory was launched upon the Council, received the sharpest criticism of learned Germany, and the warmest congratulations of the majority and the presiding Cardinals. On the following day the Pope himself alighted from his carriage to meet the orator, and expressed the liveliest satisfaction. "Bene scripsisti de me," said Pius IX.—an allusion, observes the biographer, to the words which our Lord was reported to have spoken to St Thomas Aquinas, in commendation of