Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/289

 ] ledged that the witness of the Church and of the Episcopate was essential to any doctrine which claimed to be part of the Catholic faith. It would have made the dogma much less difficult to many members of the Roman Church. It would have relieved the strange and incredible isolation in which the new formula had placed the Pope—as apart from, independent of, the universal consciousness of Christendom. It would have suggested that the Pope represented and voiced the collective conviction of the Church, on whose testimony he was relying. But this was not the Ultramontane idea. And there is no occasion for surprise if Pius IX. rejected it. One more appeal was made to him. Ketteler, Bishop of Maintz, threw himself on his knees before the Pope, and with his eyes full of tears implored Pius to make some concession which would restore peace to the Church and to the Episcopate. It is a striking scene. Two conceptions of the Church are embodied in these two men: in Pius, the modern Ultramontane conception of absolute authority centralised and condensed in one individual; in his suppliant, the ancient Cyprianic conception of authority residing in the Collective Episcopate. In the attitude of the two men, the historian may see the old vainly pleading with the new for permission to exist; lifelong believers reduced to self-contradiction as the price of permission to remain. It was this scene which provoked a Roman contemporary to say:—

"Pius is firm and immovable, smooth and hard as marble, infinitely self-satisfied, merciless and ignorant, without any understanding of the mental conditions and needs of mankind, without any notion of the