Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/336

 316 scandalised him was the sudden condemnation, by placing on the Index, books which have been for a considerable period accepted authorities within the Church. He failed to see that to bestow sanction publicly upon a treatise, and afterwards to pronounce it heretical, was consistent with the maintenance of an unchanged faith. Moreover, if Papal Infallibility had been the traditional principle, the entire history of the Church must have presented a very different apearance [sic] from what it does. Where, he asks, is any faith in an infallible Pope exhibited in the Church during the Arian struggles? Certainly the Bishops of the Sixth Ecumenical Council conducted matters on somewhat different lines from those suggested to us by infallibilists to-day. They treated the Pope Honorius just as they would have treated any other heretic. And his successors did the same. The infallibilist falls into Scylla if he escapes Charybdis. When entreated to make a sacrifice of his intellect to this demand of the Vatican Decree, Hasenclever can only reply that such sacrifice paralyses the innermost depths of personal existence. To him it is nothing less than a suicidal suppression of that characteristic which raises us into resemblance to God. Those who cannot bring themselves to this abandonment of their human dignity will be constrained to say, in spite of all the seductions of superficial and sophistic reasonings, that the doctrine of the personal infallibility of the Pope stands in irreconcilable contradiction with the actual faith of the Catholic Church; and, accordingly, it is impossible that a real Ecumenical Council should have decreed it.

6. But these were minor incidents. The religious attention of Germany centred on Döllinger at Munich. On 17th July Archbishop Scherr of Munich left Rome with the minority. On the 18th the new dogma was pro-