Since the appearance of Gratry's Letters, what is most especially dreaded is the mention and discussion of the forgeries and fictions that have been perpetrated for centuries past in the interest of the Papacy. Should they really come to be spoken of in the Council Hall, one may be quite prepared for Legate Capalti, even if he is not presiding, striking his bell till it bursts. The Italian and Spanish majority would sooner let a speaker teach Arianism and Pelagianism than touch on this sore. Cyprian, pseudo-Isidore, Anselm, Deusdedit, Gratian, Thomas Aquinas and Cyril--these are now terrible names, and hundreds here would fain stop their ears when they are uttered. "Is there then no balm in Gilead, no physician?" Just now a theologian or historian would be worth his weight in gold, who could produce evidence that all these forgeries and inventions are genuine monuments of Christian antiquity, and that the whole edifice of papal absolutism has been built up with the purest and most conscientious loyalty to truth. For this "horse" they would now, like Richard III. of England, offer a kingdom. For the first time the world, with a free press in full possession, is to accept a new dogma with all its extensive belongings--to accept it in faith, at a time when historical criticism has attained a power against which Rome is impotent, and when its conclusions pass into the literature and the common consciousness of all thinking men with a rapidity hitherto unprecedented. The works will soon be counted not by hundreds but by thousands, which relate and make capital out of the fact that from the year 500 to 1600 deliberate fraud was at work in Rome and elsewhere for disseminating, supporting, and finding a basis for, the notion of infallibility. If they imagine in Rome that they can escape this power by means of the Index and similar fulminations, such as some French Bishops have hurled at Father Gratry, that is like sending a couple of old women with syringes to put out a palace on fire.
The leader and oracle of the infallibilists, Archbishop Manning, knows something of the contradictions of history to his pet dogma. He has heard something of the long chain of forgeries, but he demonstrates to his associates by a bold method of logic, that it is an article of faith that is at issue here, and that history and historical criticism can have nothing to say to it. "It is not, therefore, by criticism on past history, but by acts of faith in the living voice of the Church at this hour, that we can know the faith."(63) The faith which removes mountains will be equally ready--such is clearly his meaning--to make away with the facts of history. Whether any German Bishop will be found to offer his countrymen these stones to digest, time will show.