[Footnote 22: "It would be very natural that the Church which makes laws from God Himself should demand of the State that it should make no law for her subjects to which she had not previously given her approbation."--_Phillips_, ii. 577.]
[Footnote 23: "In 1644, the Holy Office, in a decree approved by Innocent X, condemned as schismatical and heretical the proposition which asserts that, when the Pontiffs promulge their decrees in places subject to the dominion of other temporal princes, they promulge laws in territories that are not theirs."--_Civiltá_, Serie VII. vol. vi. p. 292. Tarquini says 1654 (_Inst._, p. 159), the _Civiltá_ 1644.]
Measures preparatory to the Syllabus--Changes in Italy since 1846--Progress of Adverse Events--A Commination of Liberties--A Second Assembly of Bishops without Parliamentary Functions--The Curse on Italy--Origin of the phrase "A Free Church in a Free State"--Projected Universal Monarchy.
Being notoriously deficient in theological training, Pius IX was not unnaturally seized with a desire to reduce the rebel nations by raising contested doctrines to the rank of dogmas. When the reactionary movement in politics had attained its full momentum, he called an assembly of bishops, whose splendour, surrounding his throne, might restore to it some of the departed _prestige_. At the same time, summoning the bishops for consultation and for ceremonial purposes, but not at all for parliamentary ones, would be a secure step of progress in the absorption of the power of the collective episcopate into the Papacy. In the midst of two hundred prelates, as we have already seen, he proclaimed the Immaculate Conception, in 1854. As a display of absolute authority in the highest realm, that of dogma, this act did more to advance the proper ideas than an immensity of writing. We have already quoted the assertion that it crushed Gallicanism. But ideas were only stepping-stones to facts. Professor Michelis asserts that even during the gathering of 1854 an attempt was made in some large assembly of bishops to induce them to proclaim Papal infallibility as a Catholic dogma.[24]
The prelates, who, on their way to Rome in 1846, had looked with joy on the spectacle of unity, now found that spectacle slightly blemished. One heretic temple stood in Turin--a proof that after all the extirpations of the Waldenses, a root had still lurked in the ground. This temple had no images, and had the Bible in mother-tongue. It bore outside, in words that any cowherd might read, if he could read at all, a verse of Jeremiah: "Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." And this was not only suffered, but done by the House of Savoy!