sole official and God-appointed guardian of the sacred deposit of divine truth, and, secondly, that she, and no other, enunciates to the entire world—to all who have ears to hear—the full revelation of Christ—His truth; the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; fulfilling, to the letter, the command of her Divine Master, "Go into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to every creature" (Mark xvi. 15).

How has this been possible? Simply and solely because God, Who promised that "the Spirit of Truth" (i.e., the Holy Ghost) "should abide with her for ever; and should guide her in all truth" (John xiv. 16, xvi. 12), keeps His promise. When our Lord promised to "be with" the teaching Church, in the execution of the divine commission assigned to it, "always" and "to the end of the world," that promise clearly implied, and was a guarantee, first, that the teaching authority should exist indefectibly to the end of the world; and secondly, that throughout the whole course of its existence it should be divinely guarded and assisted in fulfilling the commission given to it, viz., in instructing the nations in "all things whatsoever Christ has commanded," in other words, that it should be their infallible Guide and Teacher.

Venerable Bede, speaking of the conversion of our own country by Augustine and his monks, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, says: "And whereas he [Pope Gregory] bore the Pontifical power over all the world, and was placed over the Churches already reduced to the faith of truth, he made our nation, till then given up to idols, the Church of Christ" (Hist. Eccl. lib. ii. c. 1). If we will but listen to the Pope now, he will make it once again "the Church of Christ," instead of the Church of the "Reformation," and a true living branch, drawing its life from the one vine, instead of a detached and fallen branch, with heresy, like some deadly decay, eating into its very vitals.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II.ToC

THE POPE'S GREAT PREROGATIVE.

The clear and certain recognition of a great truth is seldom the work of a day. We often possess it in a confused and hidden way, before we can detect, to a nicety, its exact nature and limitations. It takes time to declare itself with precision, and, like a plant in its rudimentary stages, it may sometimes be mistaken for what it is not—though, once it has reached maturity, we can mistake it no longer. As Cardinal Newman observes: "An idea grows in the mind by remaining there; it becomes familiar and distinct, and is viewed in its relations; it leads to other aspects, and these again to others.... Such intellectual processes as are carried on silently and spontaneously in the mind of a party or school, of necessity come to light at a later date, and are recognised, and their issues are scientifically arranged." Consequently, though dogma is unchangeable as truth is unchangeable, this immutability does not exclude progress. In the Church, such progress is nothing else than the development of the principles laid down in the beginning by Jesus Christ Himself. Thus—to take a simple illustration—in three different councils, the Church has declared and proposed three different articles of Faith, viz., that in Jesus Christ there are (1) two natures, (2) two wills, and (3) one only Person. These may seem to some, who cannot look beneath the surface, to be three entirely new doctrines; to be, in fact, "additions to the creed". In sober truth, they are but expansions of the original doctrine which, in its primitive and revealed form, has been known and taught at all times, that is to say, the doctrine that Christ is, at once, true God and true Man. That one statement really contains the other three; the other three merely give us a fuller and a completer grasp of the original one, but tell us nothing absolutely new.

In a similar manner, and by a similar process, we arrive at a clearer and more explicit knowledge of other important truths, which were not at first universally recognised as being contained in the original deposit. The dogma of Papal infallibility is an instance in point. For though no Catholic ever doubted the genuine infallibility of the Church, yet in the early centuries, there existed some difference of opinion, as to where precisely the infallible authority resided. Most Catholics, even then, believed it to be a gift conferred by Christ upon Peter himself [who alone is the rock], and upon each Pope who succeeded him in his office, personally and individually, but some were of opinion that, not the Pope by himself, but only "the Pope-in-Council," that is to say, the Pope supported by a majority of Bishops, was to be considered infallible. So that, while all admitted the Pope with a majority of the Bishops, taken together, to be divinely safeguarded from teaching error, yet the prevailing and dominant opinion, from the very first, went much further, and ascribed this protection to the Sovereign Pontiff likewise when acting alone and unsupported. This is so well known, that even the late Mr. Gladstone, speaking as an outside observer, and as a mere student of history, positively brings it as a charge against the Catholic Church that "the Popes, for well-nigh a thousand years, have kept up, with comparatively little intermission, their claim to dogmatic infallibility" (Vat. p. 28). Still, the point remained unsettled by any dogmatic definition, so that, as late as in 1793, Archbishop Troy of Dublin did but express the true Catholic view of his own day when he wrote: "Many Catholics contend that the Pope, when teaching the Universal Church, as their supreme visible head and pastor, as successor to St. Peter, and heir to the promises of special assistance made to him by Jesus Christ, is infallible; and that his decrees and decisions in that capacity are to be respected as rules of faith, when they are dogmatical, or confined to doctrinal points of faith and morals. Others," the Archbishop goes on to explain, "deny this, and require the expressed or tacit acquiescence of the Church assembled or dispersed, to stamp infallibility on his dogmatic decrees." Then he concludes:—"Until the Church shall decide upon this question of the Schools, either opinion may be adopted by individual Catholics, without any breach of Catholic communion or peace."

This was how the question stood until 1870. But it stands in that position no longer; for the Church has now spoken—Roma locuta est, causa finita. Hence, no Catholic can now deny or call into question the great prerogative of the Vicar of Christ, without suffering shipwreck of the faith. At the Vatican Council, Pope Pius IX. and the Archbishops and Bishops of the entire Catholic world were gathered together in Rome, and after earnest prayer and prolonged discussion, they declared that the prerogative of infallibility, which is the very source of Catholic unity, and the very secret of Catholic strength, resides in the individual Pope who happens, at the time, to occupy the Papal chair, and that when he speaks ex cathedrâ, his definitions are infallibly true, and consonant with Catholic revelation, even before they have been