I shall confine what I have to say to the three following heads :-First, to a narrative of certain facts external to the Council, but affecting the estimate of its character and acts; secondly, to an appreciation of the internal spirit and action of the Council; and thirdly, to a brief statement of the two dogmatic Constitutions published in its third and fourth Sessions.

First, as to the external history of the Council. As yet, no narrative, or official account of its proceedings, has been possible. The whole world, Catholic and Protestant, has been therefore compelled to depend chiefly upon newspapers. And as these powerfully preoccupy and prejudice the minds of men, I thought it my duty, during the eight months in which I was a close and constant witness of the procedure and acts of the Council, to keep pace with the histories and representations made by the press in Italy, Germany, France, and England. This, by the watchful care of others in England and in Rome, I was enabled to do. In answer to an inquiry from this country as to what was to be believed respecting the Council, I considered it my duty to reply: 'Read carefully the correspondence from Rome published in England, believe the reverse, and you will not be far from the truth.' I am sorry to be compelled to say that this is, above all, true of our own journals. Whether the amusing blunders and persistent misrepresentations were to be charged to the account of ill will, or of want of common knowledge, it was often not easy to say. Two things however were obvious. The journals of

Catholic countries, perverse and hostile as they might be, rarely if ever made themselves ridiculous. They wrote with great bitterness and animosity: but with a point which showed that they understood what they were perverting; and that they had obtained their knowledge from sources which could only have been opened to them by violation of duty. Their narratives of events which were passing under my own eyes, day by day, were so near the truth, and yet so far from it, so literally accurate, but so absolutely false, that for the first time I learned to understand Paolo Sarpi's' History of the Council of Trent :' and foresaw how perhaps, from among nominal Catholics, another Paolo Sarpi will arise to write the History of the Council of the Vatican. But none of this applies to our own country. I am the less disposed to charge these misrepresentations, in the case of English correspondents, to the account of ill will, though they abundantly showed the inborn animosity of an anti-Catholic tradition, because neither correspondents nor journalists ever willingly expose themselves to be laughed at. I therefore put it down to the obvious reason that when English Protestants undertake to write of an Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, nothing less than a miracle could preserve them from making themselves ridiculous. This, I am sorry to know, for the fair name of our country, has been the effect produced by English newspapers upon foreign countries. Latterly, however, they seemed to have learned prudence, and to have relied no longer on correspondents who, hardly knowing the name, nature, use, or purpose of anything

about which they had to write, were at the mercy of such informants as English travellers meet at a table-d'hôte in Rome. Then appeared paragraphs without date or place, duly translated, as we discovered by comparing them, from Italian and German newspapers. They were less amusing, but they were even more misleading. By way of preface, I will give the estimate of two distinguished Bishops, who are beyond suspicion, as to the truthfulness of one notorious journal.

Of all the foreign sources from which the English newspapers drew their inspiration, the chief, perhaps, was the 'Augsburg Gazette.' This This paper has many titles to special consideration. The infamous matter of Janus first appeared in it under the form of articles. During the Council, it had in Rome at least one English contributor. Its letters on the Council have been translated into English and published by a Protestant bookseller, in a volume by Quirinus.

I refrain from giving my own estimate of the book, until I have first given the judgment of a distinguished Bishop of Germany, one of the minority opposed to the definition, whose cause the 'Augsburg Gazette' professed to serve.

Bishop Von Ketteler, of Mayence, publicly protested against the systematic dishonesty of the correspondent of the "Augsburg Gazette." It is a pure invention,' he adds, that the Bishops named in that journal declared that Döllinger represented, as to the substance of the question (of infallibility), the opinions of a majority of the German Bishops.' And this, he said, 'is not an isolated error, but part of a system

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which consists in the daring attempt to publish false news, with the object of deceiving the German public, according to a plan concerted beforehand.' . . . . . 'It will be necessary one day to expose in all their nakedness and abject mendacity the articles of the "Augsburg Gazette." They will present a formidable and lasting testimony to the extent of injustice of which party men, who affect the semblance of superior education, have been guilty against the Church.'* Again, at a later date, the Bishop of Mayence found it necessary to address to his Diocese another public protest against the inventions of the 'Augsburg Gazette.' The "Augsburg Gazette," he says, 'hardly ever pronounces my name without appending to it a falsehood.' 'It would have been easy for us prove that every Roman letter of the "Augsburg Gazette" contains gross perversions and untruths. Whoever is conversant with the state of things here, and reads these letters, cannot doubt an instant that these errors are voluntary, and are part of a concerted system designed to deceive the public. If time fails me to correct publicly this uninterrupted series of falsehoods, it is impossible for me to keep silence when an attempt is made, with so much perfidy, to misrepresent my own convictions.'†

to

* The Vatican, March 4, 1870, p. 145.

†The Vatican, June 17, 1870, p. 319. The Archbishop of Cologne has condemned a pretended Catholic journal in which the dogma of the Infallibility is attacked, and the proceedings of the Council misrepresented and vilified. The sentence of the Archbishop on this matter derives the greater weight from the fact of his having, as he states, formed part of the minority in the memorable vote of July 13. The Archbishop says: "The clergy of this Diocese are

Again, Bishop Hefele, commenting on the Roman correspondents of the 'Augsburg Gazette' says: 'It is evident that there are people, not Bishops, but

aware that a weekly paper, the Rheinischer Merkur, constantly attacks, in an odious manner, and with ignoble weapons, the Holy Church, in the person of its lawful chiefs the Pope and the Bishops, and in its highest representative the Ecumenical Council; so that men's minds are disturbed, and the hearts of the faithful alienated from the Church. It also openly advocates the abolition, by the secular authority, of the Church's liberty and independence. I therefore hold it to be my duty, in discharge of my pastoral office, to expose the anti-Catholic character of the said paper; not because I regard it as of any greater importance than those other more noisy organs of the press which are the exponents of hatred against religion, but simply because the paper above-named pretends to be Catholic. It is on that account that, as Catholic Bishop of this city, I feel called upon to denounce the falsehood of the assumption of the name of Catholic by a journal which is labouring to overthrow the unity of the Church by separating Catholics from that rock on which she is founded. This declaration is also due from me to those my Right Reverend Brethren in the Episcopate who belonged with me to the minority in the Council. The journal in question assumes to be the exponent of the sentiments of that minority, but it never was in any way, directly or indirectly, recognised by it or any of its members; it has been, on the contrary, repeatedly blamed and denounced. Wherefore I exhort all the Rev. Clergy of the Archdiocese to be mindful of their duty as sons of the Catholic Church; and not countenance in any way whatsoever, either by taking it in or reading it, the journal above-named, which outrages our holy Mother, rejects her authority, and desires to see her enslaved. I also exhort you on all fitting occasions to warn your flocks of the dangerous and anti-Catholic character of that journal, so that they may be dissuaded from buying or reading it, and may escape being deluded by its errors. I had resolved to order an instruction to be given from the pulpit upon the more recent decisions of the Council, and especially upon the infallible teaching of the Pope, and to explain therein the true sense of the Dogma; and thus to remove the prejudices that have been raised against it, as if it were a novel doctrine or one in contradiction to the end of the Church's constitution, or to sound reason; and to meet generally the objections raised against the validity of the Council's decision."'