by Augustine of Florence, and monk, as was Ambrosius, of Camaldoli. "Ambrose," says his biographer," was conspicuous at that council for his erudition and fidelity to the Pope. He was always contending with the Greeks for the privileges of the Apostolic see and vicar of Christ." On the other hand, he wrote an urgent letter to the Pope, which is given at length, conjuring him to conclude the union. After this, it is said that he composed a speech in Greek, which he wanted much to deliver but there were some who, jealous of the reputation that he would be likely to acquire by it, managed to get him denied leave to do so, on the ground that he was a Latin. All that is said farther of the part taken by him there is that he subscribed in due form with the rest of prelates to its sessions and acts.-(Vit. Lib. iii. 28, 9.)

I was therefore thrown back once more upon my own resources, for the Dublin left me just where it might have helped me most. I have shown that the discovery of the decree in Latin, whether as part of the acts of the Council, or in an independent form of its own, professing to be authentic or original, commenced with Justiniani (for even the declaration of Massarellus rests, as far as my knowledge goes, upon his authority likewise) and ended with the friend of Orsi, under whose good offices it would seem to have broken down. At all events, I can most confidently assert that no copy, taken from those sources enumerated by him, of the decree in Latin has yet been printed. Printed, however, that decree certainly was, before either Bartholomew Abraham, or Caryophilus translated and published the Greek acts; but there are some curious facts connected with its first appearance in print, which to the best of my knowledge have never been brought out beforecertainly not by Bossuet, his friends, or his opponents. Two contemporary historians of note, without attempting anything like a full summary of what passed at the Council of Florence, have inserted its decree in one of their chapters-Flavius Blondus, secretary both of Eugenius IV. and Pius II.: and S. Antoninus, raised to be Archbishop of Florence by Eugenius IV. in A.D. 1446. Neither of their works appeared in print, however, during their lifetime. That of S. Antoninus was first printed in A.D. 1481, that of Blondus three years after, and both at Venice; S. Antoninus therefore got hold of the public ear first, as was natural. Now, curiously enough, in S. Antoninus the disputed clause runs, "quemadmodum etiam," &c.(Hist. tom. iii., tit. xxii., c. 11, sect. 1 ed. 1491.) In Blondus, on the contrary (Dec. iii., lib. x., pp. 550, 551 ed. 1531), it runs "quemadmodum et," &c. Here, therefore, we

seem brought to the root of the controversy, and I think it will be seen which reading has the best chance of being the most correct of these two. A slight smudge of ink over the word "et" in a manuscript would lead to the idea that it was the abbreviated form of "etiam," in which form it is printed frequently (et) in black-letter editions. But he that meant etiam," would take good care to draw a line over the abbreviated form "et." S. Antoninus, thus misprinted then, let us say, having come out first, was first read, and ever afterwards referred to. Hence, John Nauclerus, president of the University of Tubingen, speaking of the Council of Florence, towards the end of that century, says (Chron. Gen. xlviii., p. 278, ed. 1516): "A copy of the bull of union is to be found in Antoninus, the historian." I have no doubt that Cherubini, besides Bartholomew Abraham, and Caryophilus, appropriated his version without scruple; which was that of a member of the Council, afterwards archbishop of the city in which it was held, and a saint. And how could I, with these facts before me, suspect his version (revised in a single particular from that of Blondus) as not expressed in the original Latin of that decree? I am come to the disagreeable part of my tale. Looking through contemporary writers, I was struck to find that clause of the decree suppressed altogether for a time by them, and too systematically to have been the effect of accident. For instance, we have the great provincial, John de Turrecremata-who had been the life and soul of the Latin party in all their disputes with the Greeks-before the Council had separated, but after the Greeks had left, quoting the terms of the Florentine decree, there and then, in reply to the deputy from Basle, but breaking off abruptly when he came to that clause, as though it had never existed.-(Ap. Colet. Concil. tom. xviii., p. 1427, et seq. Respons. ad Art. 1.) positions, indeed, elsewhere presupposed its omission. It was inferred from his words to the deputy that the Greeks had been induced to subscribe to his extremest views. The consequence was, that in A.D. 1441 Peter of Versailles was despatched to Eugenius by Charles VII. to demand that another council should be summoned to correct the decisions of Basle and Florence together; of Basle that had done too much, of Florence that had done too little. "The Council of Basle," said Peter, "stimulated one extreme by its menaces, when it endeavoured to overthrow the truth of the supreme power vested in one. The Council of Florence has well elucidated this truth so far, as is evident from the decree relating to the Greeks, but for regulating the use of that power,

His

it has set forth nothing-it has spoken nothing; whence it is considered by many to have stimulated the other extreme."(ap. Raynald., A.D. 1441, n. 10.) How does Cardinal Turrecremata reply to him-for again it was he who was selected to be spokesman? His whole discourse turns upon the decree of the Council of Florence, but in no one place does he let fall the smallest hint that it contained a word more on the subject of the power of the Pope, than he had cited in his reply to the Deputy from Basle. Again and again he insists upon the necessity of adhering to it, as having been the work of an œcumenical synod, pronounced by the Pope, its president, and as such, unalterable: but he speaks under evident reserve as to what was really contained in it: he never notices, still less contradicts, the statement of the Ambassador, that it contained no clause bearing on the exercise of the Papal power.-(Tom. v. p. 234, et seq. of Mansi's Supplement to Coletus. This speech is elsewhere called his "apparatus sup. decreto Eugenii IV.," if I am not mistaken.) He founds a grand appeal on the decree so represented at Bourges :-"Wonder of wonders, the Fathers of Basle shrink from the subject: the Greeks and Armenians follow it up: the Church is deserted by her own children, and embraced by foreigners."-(ap. Mansi, tom. xxxi. p. 125.) As may readily be imagined, the ultra-Latinisers among the Greeks took their cue from him. John Plusidenus, in his treatise on behalf of the Council of Florence, (ap. Allat. Grec. Orthod., vol. i., pp. 645-6,) ignores the clause altogether. He ignores it even more pointedly in the Greek summary printed by Mansi, and ascribed to him.-(Tom. v., p. 222-6 of the Supplement to Coletus.) "The Supreme Pontiff of Rome," he says, "it clearly sets forth as successor of the blessed Peter," which is his epitome of it. Artfully he had stated, by way of preface to it, that the Greeks had agreed "to pay reverence and submission to the Pope of Rome, as previously, and in time past, had been traditionally rendered, and delineated in the holy canons." Gennadius Scholarius, afterwards Patriarch of Constantinople, if the piece ascribed to him be really by him, (v. Cave. Hist. Lit. s.v.) is guilty of the same ruse, c. 5 of his Apology (printed at Rome in 1577). He quotes that part of the decree relating to the Pope without any mention at all of the last clause in it. Two pages on, he betrays his knowledge of it by distorting its identical words into a confirmation of what he had been endeavouring to prove himself from the Gospels. "Which position the Saints, and the acts of the ecumenical synods, most clearly set forth." Neither of these writers venture to quote the clause in its

proper place, or as it stands, for fear it should tell against them, or their misrepresentation of it be exposed; they bring it in represented in their own way, where they cannot be proved to have mis-quoted it, simply because they cannot be proved quoting it. One can foresee perfectly what a crushing reply will suggest itself in some quarters to the facts here adduced, or rather to my inferences from them. Some will see in them evidence, amounting to demonstration, that the presence or absence of the clause was not of the slightest importance to the definition itself, of which it was a mere confirmation: a mere appeal to the acts of œcumenical synods, and to the holy canons, in proof of the assertion of plenary power as appertaining by divine right to the Pope. "Comme cela est aussi contenu dans les actes des conciles œcumeniques, et dans les saints canons," as Abbé Rohrbacker has it. If the Greeks had really made that admission as well, how utterly inexplicable in Cardinal Turrecremata-one of the ablest controversialists in all Church-history-to have passed it over! Why, it would have more than doubled the force of his reply, both to the Deputy from Basle, and the Ambassador from France, could he have stated, without fear of contradiction, that the Greeks had granted, not only that the Pope was, by divine appointment, head of the Church, but that every claim that could ever be made for him in the way of power, plenary and illimitable, had its attestation in the acts of cecumenical synods, one and all, and in the holy canons! Only look back to what Mansi has expressly said on that head. No! it was safer far, when the Greeks were fairly gone, to say nothing of the clause which had been put in to satisfy them, and on the true meaning of which they would have been sure to insist, as long, at least, as they held by the Council. When they had abjured it, even their own countrymen might quote the decree without that clause, or put what construction they pleased on the decree itself, without anyone caring to contradict them on that side. The Basle Fathers were the only practical difficulty when the Greeks were gone: and when all hope of retaining the Greeks in their allegiance to the Council of Florence was at an end; it was on them that attention was concentrated all the more, to the sparing of no argument to bring them over. This, perhaps, will account for the last case of suppression that I can find on record-as late as A.D. 1480-in the summary of the Council of Florence, composed by Augustine Patricius, Canon of Sienna, at the instance of Francis Piccolomini, Cardinal of the same place. Professing to give a true summary of the decree, (c. 93, ap. Colet., tom. xviii., p. 1299, et seq.) he

ends that part of it relating to the Pope with the sentence which says, that "to him plenary power of tending, ruling, and governing the universal Church, had been given, in blessed Peter, by our Lord Jesus Christ." As, in fact, every writer who had described the decree up to his time, had mutilated it before him. So, that, perhaps, had not those grave historians, Flavius Blondus, and S. Antoninus, happened to go out of their way to dwell upon the Council of Florence in their general histories, and given its decree with that clause faithfully inserted in it, though differing apparently amongst themselves on one point in their versions of it, and neither of them claiming to have transcribed their version word for word from the original in Latin, or one of the authenticated copies made on the spot it is quite possible, I say, that had that clause been first published to the world, not by them, but in the Greek Acts edited by Bartholomew Abraham, and afterwards by Caryophilus, it would have been stigmatised as a Greek interpolation and instead of disputing now about its adequate rendering, we might have been calumniating the Greek version for having it there at all. So deeply, moreover, has its omission been engrained in us Westerns through the precedent of Turrecremata, that a writer, usually so exact and candid as Dr. Alzog, has seen fit to encourage that practice in the nineteenth century, by conforming to it, and of all works, in his ecclesiastical history. (Sect. 272.)*

I have no sort of predilection for the Basle Fathers myself: on the contrary, my sympathies are with the Council of Florence, and its president, Eugenius IV., whose decree in its literal, historical, and grammatical sense I am bound to reverence and uphold. But I am not, therefore, bound to justify, or to approve of all that his supporters, or the members of that Council said or did as individuals, and out of Council. And while I admire the skill and ability which Turrecremata displayed on all occasions, and sympathize heartily with the general cause for which he was contending, I cannot for one moment, excuse his suppression of that clause, which of all men he certainly must have done with his eyes open. Lasting triumphs are seldom to be secured by suppressing facts and it was almost in the very year in which this long-lost clause was re-instated in history that Luther was born.

I should be most happy to have my impressions dispelled: but was it due to the same influence that the Latin copies of the acts of the council of Florence have disappeared nobody

*Canon Oakeley's letter on Dr. Pusey's recent work, I regret to say, exhibits a further instance.-(P. 52.)

VOL. IV.

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