Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/71

 ] in Scripture reading, for real interpretation. Theories were read into apostolic utterances from which they could by no critical ingenuity be derived.

The greatest theologian of the Roman Church, St Thomas Aquinas, is an embodiment of mediæval theories of papal claims. He died in 1274. The treatise, De Regimine Principum, whether his or not, was universally ascribed to him in former days, and possessed for many centuries the weight of his name and authority. It represents, at any rate, the prevailing mediæval view. By an obvious misuse of the metaphor that the Pope is the Head of the Church, it draws the inference that from the Head all understanding descends to the Body. In the Pope is the plenitude or fulness of all grace; for he alone confers plenary indulgence on all sinners, so that the words originally applied to Christ are also applicable to him: "of his fulness have all we received." Certainly those who accepted habitually this view were being prepared for the conclusion that the Church was the passive recipient of the Pope's infallible utterances.

And yet it by no means follows that St Thomas Aquinas drew the infallibilist inferences, still less that he taught the Vatican doctrine. It is acknowledged by a recent Roman theologian that while the theology of the Middle Ages on the primacy attained in him its climax, yet he has not developed the doctrine systematically. In point of fact, from an infallibilist standpoint, he still leaves much to be desired. He taught that "we must not believe that the governor of the Universal Church should wish to deceive anybody, specially in those matters which the whole Church receives and approves." And he argued from this in