heresy twelve centuries after his death. The question which has importance for our times is not whether this or that Pope was a heretic, but whether it is possible for a Pope to be a heretic. The case of Honorius shows that as late as the seventh century no suspicion had entered the mind of the Church that it was not. We need not go behind the acclamations of the Council, Anathema to the heretic Sergius, anathema to the heretic Honorius.' If these anathemas are not conclusive against the individual, they are conclusive against the Pope. They prove to demonstration that whether Honorius personally deserved condemnation or not, his official position was not regarded in men's minds then, either as securing him against the possibility of falling into heresy, or as protecting him against condemnation if he did.

If

For another reason, the question concerning the personal orthodoxy of Honorius or any other Pope is one with which we have the very slightest concern. When it was suggested that we might content ourselves with the guidance of the Holy Scriptures, Romanist advocates have replied, that though the Bible may be infallible it is not an infallible guide: that is to say, it does not protect those who follow it from danger of going wrong. Surely now we may say as much for the Pope. Let him be infallible if you please; let him be in his heart of the most admirable orthodoxy, still he is not an infallible guide if by his public utterances he leads Christian people wrong. a guide misconduct us, it is not the least comfort to us to be told that this man has really a most thorough knowledge of the passes, and before being admitted as guide had passed a most brilliant examination. Now it is beyond controversy that cases have occurred when Christian people would have gone wrong if they followed the guidance of the bishop of Rome. Liberius may in his heart have had infallible knowledge that Athanasius was in the right and his opponents vile heretics; but the Christian world was not concerned with the thoughts of Liberius but with his acts; and they who were guided by them would find themselves ranged against Athanasius and on the side of his opponents. And not to go through a host of other cases, at which I have glanced already,

where the Christian world avoided heresy by following some guidance different from that of the bishop of Rome, Honorius may have had in his heart, if you choose to say so, the most orthodox abhorrence of Monothelism. But all this supposed internal orthodoxy does not alter the fact that in his capacity of guide he did all that in him lay to lead the Christian world into that heresy. So it remains proved that even if it were possible to demonstrate that no bishop of Rome had ever entertained sentiments that were not most rigidly orthodox, still the Pope is not an infallible guide.

XXIII.

THE POPE'S TEMPORAL POWER.

NYONE who has read enough of Roman Catholic peri

odical literature, within the last ten or twenty years, to become familiar with their internal controversies, will know something of the disputes between the 'maximizers' and the 'minimizers';* the latter party being anxious to reduce to a minimum the system of doctrine to which the Church's Infallibity was to be regarded as pledged; setting aside as not spoken ex cathedra a number of Papal utterances which, in the judgment of their opponents, could not be disregarded without falling into the sin of heresy. In fact, a Roman Catholic who has to engage in controversy with Protestants naturally dislikes to weaken his position by extending it too much, and therefore is glad to represent himself as not bound to defend any doctrines to which the Church's Infallibility is not clearly pledged. But if he were suspected by a loyal member of his own communion of not believing those doctrines which he has declined to defend, he would certainly be set forth as a bad Catholic. If I chose to pursue further the subject of Papal Infallibility, I could easily swell the list of decisions made by papal authority which are now acknowledged to be erroneous. In each of these cases Roman Catholic apologists are forced to make excuses in different ways, trying to show that the attribute of Infallibility did not attach to the erroneous decision. But the general result is that, while Roman Catholics are now mainly agreed on the principle

This was written several years ago, and as I have not kept up my reading of Roman Catholic periodicals, I really don't know how far the Vatican Council suc ceeded in putting an end to these disputes.

that the Pope is infallible, the greatest differences of opinion will be found among them as to whether any particular papal utterance is infallible; and any Roman Catholic who does not like to accept any decision of the Pope need have no difficulty in producing a parallel case of some previous decision, to all appearance possessing the same claims to reverence, but which is now acknowledged to have been wrong. So that, in short, I do not know how to sum up the Roman Catholic doctrine on this subject except by the formula, The Pope is always infallible, except when he makes a mistake.

I will not trouble you with the case of such an extreme maximizer as one who, a little time ago, insisted, in defiance of his ecclesiastical superiors, that Roman Catholics are still bound by the Pope's decrees against the motion of the earth; for it may be considered that the earth has had the Pope's permission to move since the year 1821, when the prohibition against Copernican books was removed from the Index. But there have been later papal decrees, concerning the obligation of accepting which there has been much controversy among Roman Catholics.

If all the official utterances of a Pope are to be regarded as authoritative, no Pope has given more employment to the believers in his Infallibility than Pius IX. found occasion to do in his long pontificate. The most remarkable was the encyclical 'Quanta Cura,' published on the 8th December, 1864, which was accompanied by a syllabus containing extracts from previous allocutions of the Pope condemning eighty false doctrines. Dr. Newman, who had been always an extreme minimizer, laboured hard to relieve himself from the obligation of accepting this syllabus. It was not signed by the Pope himself, but only by his officials; therefore if you accepted the accompanying encyclical, you might reject the syllabus. Thus the authority of the eighty articles rested only on the several allocutions in which they were first contained; and then Dr. Newman tried, by examining the special occasion on which each condemnation was delivered, to limit

its application to some particular case. All this special pleading is as offensive to a thoroughgoing Papalist like

Manning as it is unsuccessful in the judgment of outsiders like ourselves. It is plain enough that here the Pope has selected a number of his judgments in individual cases, and has made them into general principles for the instruction of the universal Church. They are principles of which the party who predominated at the Vatican Council are not in the least ashamed; and it was generally understood that if the sittings of that Council had been prolonged, they would have been formulated in such a way as to receive the sanction of the Council. In fact, my own copy of them forms part of the proceedings of the Vatican Council brought out by a Roman Catholic publisher Cum permissu superiorum,' where the Encyclical and the Syllabus hold the first place in the 'Acta publica quibus concilium Vaticanum præparatum est.'

Now in this Syllabus the proposition is condemned (77) that in our age it is no longer expedient that the Catholic should be the only religion of the State, and that all other forms of worship whatever should be excluded. Of course this condemnation leaves it free to the Pope to tolerate toleration where the civil power is too weak to enforce uniformity; but the proper state of things is taught to be one in which the Roman Catholic religion shall be supreme or rather sole. What kind of toleration should be allowed to native subjects of a Roman Catholic State may be guessed from the next article, which condemns the proposition that it is laudable in such a State to allow even foreign settlers the free exercise of their religion. In the accompanying Encyclical, which even Dr. Newman allows has the undoubted authority of the Pope, it is condemned as a doctrine altogether opposed to Scripture, to the Church, and to the Fathers, that violators of the Catholic religion should not be restrained by punishments except when the public peace requires. Pius IX. echoes the language of his predecessor, Gregory XVI., in stigmatizing the claim of liberty of conscience and worship as a 'deliramentum'; and as a necessary consequence similarly stigmatizing the claim of liberty of speech or liberty of the press. In art. 24 of the Syllabus the doctrine is condemned that the Church has not the power of applying coercion, or