them, his followers are perfectly and absolutely helpless. For if they allege alteration and innovation, the very same language will be available against them which has been used against the men that have had faith and courage given them to protest against alteration and innovation now. "Most impious are you, in charging on us that which, as you know, we cannot do. We have not altered, we have only defined. What the Church believed implicitly heretofore, she believes implicitly hereafter. Do not appeal to reason; that is rationalism. Do not appeal to Scripture; that is heresy. Do not appeal to history; that is private judgment. Over all these things I am judge, not you. If you tell me that I require you to affirm to-day, under anathema, what yesterday you were allowed or encouraged to deny, my answer is that in and by me alone you have any means of knowing what it is you affirm, or what it is you deny." This is the strain which is consistently held by the bold trumpeters of Vaticanism, and which has been effectual to intimidate the feeble-minded and faint-hearted, who seem to have formed, at the Council of the Vatican, so large a proportion of its opponents; nay, which has convinced them, or has performed in them the inscrutable process, be it what it may, which is the Roman substitute for conviction, that what in the Council itself they denounced as breach of faith, after the Council they are permitted, nay bound, to embrace, nay to enforce. Let me now refer to another of these fantastic replies. We are told it would be an entire mistake to confound this Infallibility of the Pope, in the province assigned to it, with absolutism: "The Pope is bound by the moral and divine law, by the commandments of God, by the rules of the Gospel, and by every definition in faith and morals that the Church has ever made. No man is more bound by law than the Pope; a fact plainly known to himself, and to every bishop and priest in Christendom." Every definition in faith and morals! These are written definitions. What are they but another Scripture? What right of interpreting this other Scripture is granted to the Church at large, more than of the real and greater Scripture? Here is surely, in its perfection, the petition for bread, answered by the gift of a stone. Bishop Vaughan does not venture to assert that the Pope is bound by the canon law, the written law of the Church of Rome. The abolition of the French Sees under the Concordat with Napoleon, and the deposition of their legitimate Bishops, even if it were the only instance, has settled that question for ever. Over the written law of his Church the pleasure of the Pope is supreme. And this justifies, for every practical purpose, the assertion that law no longer exists in that Church; in the same very real sense as we should say there was no law in England in the reign of James the Second, while it was subject to a dispensing power. There exists no law, wherever a living ruler, an executive head, claims and exercises, and is allowed to possess, a power of annulling or a power of dispensing with the law. If Bishop Vaughan does not know this, I am sorry to say he does not know the first lesson that every English citizen should learn; he has yet to pass through the lispings of civil childhood. This exemption of the individual, be he who he may, from the restraints of the law is the very thing that in England we term absolutism. By absolutism we mean the superiority of a personal will to law, for the purpose of putting aside or changing law. Now that power is precisely what the Pope possesses. First, because he is infallible in faith and morals, when he speaks ex cathedrâ, and he himself is the final judge which of his utterances shall be utterances ex cathedrâ. He has only to use the words, "I, ex cathedrâ, declare;" or the words, "I, in the discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of my supreme Apostolic authority, define as a doctrine regarding faith or morals, to be held by the Universal Church;"* and all words that may follow, be they what they may, must now and hereafter be as absolutely accepted by every Roman Catholic who takes the Vatican for his teacher, with what in their theological language they call a Divine faith, as must any article of the Apostles' Creed. And what words they are to be that may follow, the Pope by his own will and motion is the sole judge. It is futile to say, the Pope has the Jesuits and other admirable advisers near him, whom he will always consult. I am bound to add that I am sceptical as to the excellence of these advisers. These are the men who cherish, methodise, transmit, and exaggerate, all the dangerous traditions of the Curia. In them it lives. The ambition and self-seeking of the Court of Rome have here their root. They seem to supply that Roman malaria, which Dr. Newman† tells us encircles the base of the rock of St. Peter. But the question is not what the Pope will do; it is what he can do, what he has power to do; whether, in Bishop Vaughan's language, he is bound by law; not whether he is so wise and so well-advised that it is perfectly safe to leave him not bound by law. On this latter question there may be a great conflict of opinions; but it is not the question before us. *Vatican Decrees,' chap. iii. you if It cannot be pleaded against him, were it ever so clear, that his declaration is contrary to the declaration of some other Popes. For here, as in the case of the Christian Creed, he may tell you-always speaking in the manner supposed that that other Pope was not speaking cathedrâ. Or he may tell that there is no contrariety. If you have read, if you have studied, if you have seen, you have humbly used every means of getting to the truth, and you return to your point that contrariety there is, again his answer is ready: That assertion of yours is simply your private judgment; and your private judgment is just what my infallibility is meant and appointed to put down. My word is the tradition of the Church. It is the nod of Zeus it is the judgment of the Eternal. There is no escaping it, and no disguising it: the whole Christian religion, according to the modern Church of Rome, is in the breast of one man. The will and arbitrament of one man will for the future decide, through half the Christian world, what religion is to be. It is unnecessary to remind me that this power is limited to faith and morals. We know it is; it does not extend to geometry, or to numbers. Equally is it beside the point to observe that the infallibility alleged has not received a new definition : I have nowhere said it had. It is the old gift: it is newly lodged. Whatever was formerly ascribed either to the Pope, or to the Council, or to the entire governing body of the Church, or to the Church general and diffused, the final sense of the great Christian community, aided by authority, tested by discussion, mellowed and ripened by time-all-no more than all, and no less than all-of what God gave, for guidance, through the power of truth, by the Christian revelation, to the whole redeemed family, the baptized flock of the Saviour in the world; all this is now locked in the breast of one man, opened and distributed at his will, and liable to assume whatever form-whether under the name of identity or other name it matters not-he may think fit to give it. Idle then it is to tell us, finally, that the Pope is bound "by the moral and divine law, by the commandments of God, by the rules of the Gospel :" and if more verbiage and repetition could be piled up, as Ossa was set upon Olympus, and Pelion upon Ossa, to cover the poverty and irrelevancy of the idea, it would not mend the matter. For of these, one and all, the Pope himself, by himself, is the judge without appeal. If he consults, it is by his will: if he does not consult, no man can call him to account. No man, or assemblage of men, is one whit the less bound to hear and to obey. He is the judge of the moral and Divine law, of the Gospel, and of the commandments; the supreme and only final judge: and he is the judge, with no legislature to correct his errors, with no authoritative rules to guide his proceedings: with no power on earth to question the force, or intercept the effect, of his decisions. It is indeed said by Dr. Newman, and by others, that this infallibility is not inspiration. On such a statement I have two remarks to make. First, that we have this assurance on the strength only of his own private judg ment; secondly, that if bidden by the self-assertion of the Pope, he will be required by his principles to retract it,* and to assert, if occasion should arise, the contrary; thirdly, that he lives under a system of development, through which somebody's private opinion of to-day may become matter of faith for all the to-morrows of the future. What kind and class of private opinions are they that are Dr. Newman, pp. 99, 131. The Papal newspaper, 'Voce della Verità,' of Jan. 21 complains seriously of parts of Dr. Newman's Reply. |