piece of criminal audacity in him to stigmatise with his anathemas the Supreme Pastor of the Church after his supposed reparation.

With regard to the Letters of Liberius, it is certain that the Arians circulated several spurious Letters, pretending them to have been dictated by Pope Liberius. In fact, all admit that of the fifteen Letters which bear his name, the eighth and the twelfth, and the last two, are forgeries. 431 This raises at once a grave doubt as to the authenticity of the other three Letters addressed to the Eastern Bishops, to the semi-Arian chiefs, and to Victor of Capua, which are quoted as convincing proofs of the fall of Liberius. And when these three Letters are themselves looked into, evident marks are discernible proving the ignorance and folly of their author. We do not lay so much stress on the barbarous style in which they are written, as on the low tone of the sentiments and the palpable contradictions, which it is impossible to attribute to the great Pope who braved the anger of the Emperor Constantius rather than condemn Athanasius, and thereby betray the faith of Nicæa.

Neither can any difficulty be created by the two passages of St. Jerome which we mentioned above. This holy Doctor's tendency to give too ready credence to unauthorised rumours is well known. Thus, as is pointed out by Zaccaria, he represents St. Chrysostom as an Origenist, and he adopts the falsehoods spread abroad by the adherents of Paulinus to the prejudice of St. Meletius of Antioch.432 We cannot then feel surprised if he uses language implying that Liberius yielded to the demands of the Arians; the calumnies

431 Tillemont alone thought to prove the authenticity of Liberius' eighth Letter (Mém. d'Hist. Eccl., t. viii., art. lxiv., p. 233, et n. lxviii., p. 1177, seq.); but Stilting has made a very remarkable exposure of the weakness of his arguments.

432 Zaccaria, De Comm. Liberii lapsu, cap. iv., n. iv., p. 316, seq.

of the heretics were spread everywhere, and St. Jerome was deceived: the existence of such reports is proved by a passage of Sozomen.433 Moreover, it is admitted on all hands that the Chronicon of St. Jerome is full of interpolations; and in some very ancient manuscripts there is no trace of mention of the fall of Liberius.434 The passage in the book De Viris Illustribus is in open contradiction with the Chronicon, and is manifestly false. Thus, we read in the Chronicon that the hardships of exile forced Liberius to give way and sign an heretical formula; according to the Catalogue, he did so before going into exile, being persuaded to this act by Bishop Fortunatianus: so that we have here a discrepancy of two years between the accounts. Again, St. Jerome would certainly never have written as he did concerning Fortunatianus, had he not been deceived by the calumnious reports propagated by the Arians. It is untrue that this Prelate signed any formula at Milan which was heretical, or even open to suspicion; he was induced to promise that he would interrupt his communion with St. Athanasius; but most cruel violence was necessary to extort from him even this promise, and with regard to the faith itself, he never flinched. What we here say is proved by unimpeachable testimony, while there is absolutely no document which even seems to say the contrary. We may therefore safely conclude that Liberius was not induced by Fortunatianus to sign an heretical formula.

435

We will add only a few words with regard to the Preface to the Libellus Precum presented to the

433 Sozomen, l. iv., cap. xv., p. 1151. Edit. Migne.

434 See Zaccaria, 1. c., n. v., p. 317.

435 Epist. Liberii Papæ ad Eusebium Vercel., n. 8 (Coustant, p. 428); St. Athanasius, Apologia ad Constantium, n. 27 (Op., t. i., p. 247); Sulpitius Severus, 1. ii., n. xxxix., p. 15 (Migne, PP. LL., t. xx.).

Emperors Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius, the authorship of which is attributed to Faustinus and Marcellinus, contemporaries of Liberius. Baronius and Lupus may be excused for believing in the authenticity of this document; but after the proof of its spuriousness had been laid before the world by Zaccaria, Mr. Renouf ought not to have appealed to its authority as if it were not open to the slightest doubt.436 As to the passage in the Martyrology of Ado, which represents Liberius as having consented to the Arian perfidy, it is well known that Ado drew some of his materials from unreliable sources; and the words in question do not occur either in the Martyrology of Usuard or in that of Rome, published by Baronius. A few minor difficulties remain, but they do not seem to call for particular notice.

436 See Zaccaria, Op. cit., cap. vi., n. i.-iii., p. 314, seq. ; Renouf, Condemnation of Pope Honorius, p. 42.

SECTION IX.

THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE POPE AND THE SECOND

AND THIRD ECUMENICAL COUNCILS.

THE name of Liberius so frequently occurs in this controversy in connection with his alleged fall, as to cause frequent forgetfulness that one of the strongest proofs of Papal Infallibility is derived from the Acts of this very Pontiff. The materials of the argument are found in the historian Sozomen. The Macedonian heretics, derived from Macedonius, the semi-Arian Bishop of Constantinople, were widely spread over Syria, Egypt, Pontus, and Cappadocia. They maintained that the Holy Ghost differs in substance from the Father. After mentioning this, Sozomen goes on: "The Bishop of Rome (then Liberius), on hearing that this question was agitated with great acrimony, and that the contention seemed daily to increase, wrote to the Churches of the East, and urged them to receive the doctrine upheld by the Western Clergy, namely, that the Three Persons of the Trinity are of the same substance, and of equal dignity." Now here we find, first, that a controversy of faith which arose in the East, is referred to the Roman Pontiff; secondly, that he, acting according to his lawful authority, pronounces a definition of faith, and sends it to the Churches of the East, that they should profess the same doctrine as was upheld by the West. Let us

437 Sozomen, 1. vi., cap. xii., p. 1348. English version, p. 282. London, 1846.

The

suppose then for a moment that the Pope was not infallible, and that he was not regarded as such in the Church; in that case, Liberius would have been guilty of great presumption, and all the Churches of the East would have protested against his illegal interference and usurpation. Now no protest was heard from the Eastern Churches, but they, as Sozomen adds, ceased from any dispute on that subject, and kept in peace. And the same historian assigns as a reason for this change, the decision of the Roman Church-that is to say, of Pope Liberius. So that "the question having been thus once terminated by the Roman Church, each of them kept quiet, and an end was put to the debate." 438 judgment, therefore, of Pope Liberius is treated by the Greek historian as definitive, and the consequences of that judgment are peace and an end of the controversy. This clearly implies the full intellectual submission of the contending Prelates to the definition of the Roman Pontiff because Pope Liberius did not require them to carry out any disciplinary regulation, nor merely abstain from condemning the contrary doctrine, but he expressly required of all the Eastern Churches that they should profess the doctrine of the West. Consequently, their submission must undoubtedly imply that they believed in the infallibility of the Supreme Teacher of the Church.

Bossuet, referring to this passage of Sozomen, remarks that the Greek writer only says that "the controversy seemed to have had an end;"439 and he thinks that if the sentence of the Pope had been infallible, the author ought to have said that an end was put to the debate, not that it seemed to have been put. As he holds, a General Council was necessary to settle

438 Sozomen, l. c.

439 Defensio Declarationis Cleri Gallicani, pt. ii., 1. xii., cap. viii., p. 161, seq.