Finally, as to the mode of procedure, were the bishops, as they did at Trent, to agree upon their own rules of procedure, to evolve by mutual consultation the questions demanding solution, and to discuss them till all were ready to vote? Or could there be truth in the suspicion that everything was being cut and dried beforehand, and that the Court would impose ready-made rules of procedure, and allow no one but itself to introduce any subject for discussion?
As to the burning question of moral unanimity, would projected formulae be passed from hand to hand, as was done at Trent, examined in meetings of groups, retouched, and, if need be, remoulded till a form was arrived at in which all but two or three acquiesced? Or was it possible that formulae for new articles in a creed prepared behind the backs of the bishops would be imposed on millions and for ever, by a majority made up with the help of the bishops _in partibus_?
All this time, the nine determined men forming the secret Directing Congregation, were coolly looking at the same questions, and, step by step, as we shall see, when events bring out the secret plans, were settling those questions in the sense most dreaded, and going to lengths not, we believe, suggested in any of the anticipatory expressions of fear.
Earnest theologians who had not been converted by the infallibilist propaganda of recent years, were thrown into consternation. Some bishops, able administrators, saw no essential difference between Papal infallibility as a doctrine taught in many of the schools, and believed by great numbers if rejected by others perhaps greater, and the same opinion as an article of faith. In such a view, the men of thought saw the superficial glance of "practical men," as they call themselves, who never discover anything but by feeling it, and who live by acting out to-day what others thought out in time gone by.
Little difference! thought the men of foresight. We are going to be compelled to alter our catechisms and creed in the face of the Protestants; going to be compelled to teach the opposite of what we have always taught; going to part with immemorial safeguards against altering the conditions of salvation, or further narrowing the terms of membership in the Church--to part with the necessity before every such change of the open and formal process of a General Council! The proposed dogma is unlike any now in the creed, in the all-important point of being self-multiplying. If it is adopted, we shall be liable to have eternal obligations laid upon our souls, without a week's warning.