XXII.] OBITER DICTA.' 437 Jesus alone or in that of the Three Persons of the Trinity.* This is now given up as clearly erroneous teaching, but is excused as an 'obiter dictum,' the Pope having gone out of his way to answer a question he had not been asked. It seems to me that the analogy to our law courts does not hold. Judges who decide by human wisdom may go wrong for want of adequate use of human means to guide and inform their judgments. But if the Holy Spirit inspire the sentence He cannot be supposed dependent on these human means; and if information is given which had not been asked for, this surely ought to be attributed to the Holy Spirit's special direction, and to be received with all the more reverence. The Pope's authority would fail to be decisive in disputes if the parties are to be at liberty to pull his sentence to pieces, and decide how much of it they will receive. Now, as regards this particular case, remember that the Roman Church holds that an unbaptized person cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven, and that baptism in the name of Jesus alone is not valid. It follows that if the Bulgarians accepted the instruction officially given them by the Pope, hundreds of them may have imagined themselves baptized when they really were not, and then, for want of baptism, their souls must have been eternally lost. Now, it seems to me monstrous to imagine that anyone could be damned for following the guidance of him whom Christ had appointed as teacher of the Church. So that if I believed the pope to hold this office, I should find myself constrained to believe that the ruling of Nicolas was right. No evasion as to the form in which the instruction was conveyed will suffice. If the Pope be Christ's vicar, it is incredible that he could be permitted officially to mislead His people into error inconsistent with their salvation. The Vatican Council of 1870 made what must be regarded as an attempt to answer the long unsettled question, What is the test of an ex cathedra utterance? It declared that the pope speaks ex cathedra' when, performing his office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, in virtue of his apostolic authority, * Respons. ad consult. Bulg. civ., Mansi. xv., 431. he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church.' The condition here indicated is derived from Bellarmine, who makes it a condition for an ex cathedra decree that it should be addressed to the whole Church, or that it should proclaim a moral law to the whole Church. All these conditions are generally invented in order to save the Church from being bound by some palpably erroneous papal decisions. Thus, Eugenius IV., in his instruction to the Armenians, to be found annexed to the Acts of the Council of Florence, explains the doctrine of the Seven Sacraments. Now, not to speak of other points in which his teaching is now owned to be erroneous, he lays down that the matter and form of the sacrament of Orders is the delivery of the vessels, together with certain words. But as this rite and the words in question were never used in the Church for the first thousand years and more, it would follow, if this were correct, that the Church for so long a time had no valid Orders-a consequence which makes it necessary that the doctrine of Eugenius shall in some way be taken out of the category of ex cathedra decisions. Yet it is obviously a most unfair limitation to papal infallibility to maintain that the appointed guide to Christians collectively is unable to conduct them safely if they consult him individually. Really believe that the Pope is an infallible guide, and nothing but the controversial exigency of relieving yourself from assent to certain erroneous papal decisions could induce you to put such a limitation on the office entrusted to him by Christ. But, further, this measure of relief to weak consciences is altogether too sweeping in its application. For over a thousand years of the Church's history no single decree of a pope addressed to the universal Church is known. The Bull, 'Unam Sanctam,' of Pope Boniface VIII., in 1303, is the first addressed to the whole Church. I told you how a Jesuit writer urged it as an unanswerable reply to Dr. Pusey's theory of infallibility, that his condition that the Church should be undivided makes it necessary to maintain that the gift has been dormant for the last 1200 years-that is to say, for twothirds of the lifetime of the Church. And surely the objection is just as fatal if it was for the first 1200 years the gift was XXII.] WHEN THE POPE SPEAKS EX CATHEDRA.' 439 dormant, and if it were only in comparatively modern times that the pope awoke to the exercise of his full powers. To apply all this to the case of Honorius, if the defence be made for him that his erroneous doctrine was not propounded ex cathedra, the only distinction in this matter that I can recognize as rational is that between the pope's official and non-official utterances; and in this Monothelite controversy the pope's sentiments were undoubtedly expressed officially. The Eastern patriarchs would have troubled themselves little about the opinion of a private Italian divine named Honorius; but it was of the utmost importance to know what line would be taken by the bishop of Rome. But we need the less contest this point, as it would pain the papal advocates of the present day to acknowledge that Honorius, even in his private capacity, was a heretic; and they maintain that the letters of Honorius are quite orthodox. Perhaps that may be my own opinion; but not the less do I protest against Dr. Manning and his coadjutors committing such an audacious exercise of private judgment as to approve as orthodox letters which were burnt as heretical by the sixth general council, condemned by the two succeeding councils, and by all the popes for centuries in their solemn profession of faith on their day. of installation. In our times, when so many unfavourable judgments of history are reversed or mitigated, it is only natural that the heretics of old should get the benefit of the same court of appeal. Many of them are only known to us by the writings of their opponents, men often most bitterly prejudiced against them and incapable of giving them what we should count fair play. Often, no doubt, they were made answerable for consequences which, whether truly following from their premisses or not, they themselves repudiated. The subjects in debate were often most abstruse, the terminology most difficult; and it is quite possible that in some cases the differences were only verbal, and that men were counted as heretics who did not really differ from the orthodox so much in faith as in their manner of expressing themselves. I can well believe that some who are counted as bad heretics were worthy, well-meaning men, who had puzzled their heads with bad metaphysics, on subjects which the human understanding is ill able to grasp. Perhaps a Roman Catholic will say that it is because I am a heretic myself that I am inclined to think not very ill of heretics; and if I feel bound to class Pope Honorius under that denomination, I do not at all think unfavourably of him on the whole, nor am I disposed to deny that, heretic as he was, he may have been a very worthy man and a very good Christian. In fact I count that there are no heretics better entitled to charitable apologies than the Monothelites. Christianity was at the time fearfully weakened in the East by internal divisions on the question concerning our Lord's twofold nature. If by any mutual explanation union could be restored, undoubtedly the greatest benefit would be conferred on the Church. Now the most orthodox defender of Christ's twofold nature would grant, that in His sinless humanity there was not that conflict of two wills which we experience, but that in His case the law of the members' was in complete subjection to 'the law of the mind.' On the other hand, it seemed that all the Monophysites were contending for might be satisfied by an explicit recognition of the perfect harmony between our Lord's two natures. Thus there seemed to be a hopeful prospect of compromise, on the terms that both parties should agree in recognizing in our Lord a single will. The plan appeared for the moment successful; the Monophysites largely assented; the emperor adopted the scheme, and it was agreed to by the patriarchs of the four great sees-Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. The patriarch of Jerusalem alone held out, and by his strenuous opposition overturned the compromise. Certainly, then, on this occasion it was he, and not the bishop of Rome, who was the teacher of the Church. The feeling of the present day on the question whether we ought to say that our Lord had a single will or two harmonious wills would be to condemn more strongly the raising of the question than the determining it wrongly. The majority, I imagine, have rather a Carbonarian faith in the Church's doctrine on this subject; and if they had been told that it was the Dithelites whom they were to condemn as heretics, XXII.] HONORIUS AND MONOTHELISM. 441 would have been equally ready to assent. There is a sense in which Monothelism is certainly inconsistent with the truth of our Lord's twofold nature; and we must therefore rejoice that Sophronius of Jerusalem prevented the adoption of a formula which might have tended to undermine the doctrine of the Incarnation; but whether the heretical sense was that in which the doctrine was held by Sergius and other leading Monothelites is more than I will undertake to say. I have no harsh inclination to repel any excuses that may be offered for any of them; but I see no reason for making any special exemption in favour of Honorius, or separating his case from that of other Monothelites. One cannot do so without directly contradicting the sixth general council, which declared that Honorius in all things had followed the opinions of Sergius and had sanctioned his impious dogmas.' But the truth is, we have no interest whatever in debating the personal orthodoxy of Honorius, or in trying him for 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. 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 |