often demanded. If he did, he yet actually thought himself infallibly right in his assumptions; and the question comes, if a Pope can err thus tremendously, under the mistaken notion of his infallibility, what is its value? or rather, what will not be the absurdity of an infallibility which is thus ignorant of its own limits? which is so singularly self-ignorant that it deems itself infallible not only in matters in which it is infallible, but in which it is most obviously and enormously in error? Since it assures us that it is infallible when it is not, who shall assure it that it is infallible at all? Such an infallibility comes to much the same thing as no infallibility. It is as if a man should be admitted to be infallible in the mathematics, but somehow took it into his head that chemistry, botany, carpentry, and shoemaking were all parts of mathematical science. This would prove, we suppose, that he was infallible neither in the mathematics nor in any of the other things which he so strangely mistook for them. Hence Cardinal Perron, when struggling against his compatriots concerning the limit of the Gallican Liberties,' very consistently refused to condemn the doctrine of the Pope's deposing power, on the ground that, as it had been asserted and acted upon by so many Popes, the supposition of its falsehood must have a most ominous aspect on the claims of the Church of Rome! And he was consistent, say the Protestants.

For an infallibility thus ignorant of its own limits, most persons would be apt to say that the world has paid rather dearly; that the Pope's political mistakes are hardly compensated by his spiritual indefectibility; that the perspicacity and splendour of his critical and expository efforts, from the time of Gregory the Great's work on Job downwards, are but an in

different set-off against the dethronement of monarchs, the disturbance of kingdoms, and the turmoils in which for ages his too erring infallibility has kept the world: that invaluable, for example, as may be the gloss which discloses to us the unsuspected meaning of the text about Peter's two swords, (a meaning which the world, it is admitted, would never have discovered for itself,) yet that it is a considerable deduction from such inestimable benefits, that the infallibility has, in effect, played its possessor such strange pranks, and inflicted, by its quasi-utterances, such enormous mischief and miseries on mankind. If the Pope has erred in the many instances in which he has deposed monarchs, disposed of crowns, laid nations under interdict and occasioned political disturbances, Protestants are apt to surmise, that if he be a successor of Peter at all, he must have succeeded to him at the critical moment in which the Master said to him, 'Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men;' and that if his faith have not failed,' according to the promise he pleads, his reason' has certainly given way.

It would be a futile distinction to make, that the claim to universal dominion, as an adjunct of spiritual supremacy and infallibility, was restricted to dark ages; for, not to insist that infallibility, even in dark ages, is still infallibility, he who should urge such an argument would show but a superficial knowledge of ecclesiastical history. The ultramontane theory (in our judgment by far the most consistent) may have somewhat altered in form, but in substance it has been always the same. Nor was it ever developed more elaborately or with more subtlety than towards the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the

next century, by the skill of the ablest writers of the most distinguished ORDER the Church of Rome has ever boasted. Bellarmine claimed for the Papacy, by the indirect temporal power, what Gregory VII., or Innocent III., or Boniface VIII., would have appropriated more inartificially, but most instinctively, without troubling themselves with any such theoretical refinements. That,' says Ranke*, 'which was asserted in England in the heat of the struggle, was repeated by Bellarmine in the solitude of his study, in elaborate works, in a connected well-digested system. He laid it down as a fundamental maxim that the Pope was placed immediately by God over the whole Church, as its guardian and chief. Hence the fulness of spiritual power belongs to him; hence he is endowed with infallibility; he judges all, and may be judged by none; and hence a great share of temporal authority accrues to him. Bellarmine does not go so far as to ascribe to the Pope a temporal power, derived directly from divine right†; although Sixtus V. cherished this opinion, and was consequently displeased that it was abandoned; but so much the more unhesitatingly did Bellarmine attribute to him an indirect right.'

The same views substantially are maintained by De Maistre, the most strenuous defender of the Papacy in our times, in his work entitled 'The Pope,' a translation of which has just been published in this

* Vol. ii. Book vi. § i. The whole section deserves careful study.

† Bellarminus de Romano pontifice, v. vi.: 'Asserimus pontificem ut pontificem, etsi non habeat ullam meram temporalem potestatem, tamen habere in ordine ad bonum spirituale summam potestatem disponendi de temporalibus rebus omnium Christianorum.'

country. This intrepid champion contends that the Popes have never erred de fide-whatever that somewhat dubious phrase may mean-and chivalrously defends even the cause of Liberius and Honorius ; holding, moreover, essentially the same views as Bellarmine (though he declines expressly to endorse the phrase 'indirect right'), of the Pope's universal sovereignty, as an indirect consequence of his absolute spiritual supremacy. He therefore justifies (and consistently) the political conduct of the Popes, almost without exception, from Gregory VII. to Pius V.*; the mode, he admits, of papal action in such matters may and must vary in different ages; but even the mode was right for those ages, and the principles which dictated them are sound in all ages! He suggests, in conformity with his principles, that it would be wise of the moderns to imitate their forefathers, by submitting national disputes to the paternal adjudication of the Holy See; and, after laying down a hypothetical case, in which a nation, wishing to cashier its royal family, requests the Pope to provide them with another, remarks, how much better this would be than appealing to any of the modern methods of untying such knots! On the supposition that the Pope is really God's Vicegerent on earth, the hypothesis is reasonable enough; no one could object to a despotism administered by an archangel. But, unhappily,-to say nothing of the distance of such a court of appeal, the difficulty of enlightening its judgment on matters wholly foreign to it, and the fear of wasting its sacred time in an everlasting series

* Of the extent to which he carries his zeal readers may judge, when we say that he sees nothing to be ashamed of in the bull 'In cœnâ Domini.'

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of political investigations, -the nations are still disposed to doubt whether the history of the Holy See presents to us, in its several administrators, those proofs of infallible knowledge, that superiority to earthly passions, that perfect exemption from intrigue and manœuvre, rapacity and ambition, which would make it safe to submit to such a tribunal; a reluctance still likely to be felt in spite of the three guarantees, of age, celibacy, and the priestly character,' which De Maistre assures the world are our security. The nations will be apt to fear lest the appeal, instead of appeasing, should but embroil the fray,' and that, as in the middle ages themselves, the decisions of infallibility should still have to be decided by an appeal to arms. However, he distinctly enunciates his principles in the following, among many other, passages: Those writers (the French particularly) have taken upon themselves great responsibility, who first broached the question whether the sovereign pontiffs possess the right to excommunicate sovereigns, and who dilate upon the scandal of excommunications generally. Wise men are best satisfied to leave certain questions in salutary obscurity.' (p. 173.) There is nothing more reasonable, nothing more plausible, than a moderate influence of the sovereign pontiffs over the acts of princes.' (p. 181.) The argument of fact on behalf of the papal claims to temporal superiority he puts thus strongly :'Now if there be an indisputable fact, attested by all the monuments of history, it is, that the Popes in the middle age, and even long before that period, exercised great power over temporal sovereigns; that they judged them, and excommunicated them, on certain great occasions, and that not unfrequently they even declared the subjects of those princes

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