How will this test be borne? How will the doctrine of the Church and the honour of two nations be saved? The events of the next few days will decide.
_Rome, March 15._--Livy relates that, in the battle at the Thrasimene Lake, the combatants on either side, Romans and Carthaginians, felt nothing of the earthquake under their feet. Here in Rome it is not so much the heat of the contest that makes the great body of Bishops unconscious of the moral earthquake which has begun to shake the Church, for there is no strife in the ranks of the majority, and their intercourse with the other party is very small. But every one thinks first of his own home and diocese, and the Italians, Spaniards and South Americans--nearly 500 prelates in all--have abundant cause for reckoning on absolute indifference and ease, on a passive and generally willing assent. In those countries it is only money questions, the contest about Church property, that stirs men's minds. How much is to be left to the clergy or taken from them, that is the question here. And the Bishops hope that papal infallibility will give some added force to the papal decisions on the inviolability of Church property.
Among the Opposition Bishops many are still in good spirits and full of confidence. "We are too many, and we represent too considerable portions of the Christian world, for our resistance to be ignored and our votes thrust aside," is what many of them still assert. But the dominant party don't admit this. Antonelli says: "As soon as the Pope promulgates a decree with the assent of a great number of Bishops, he is infallible, and therefore a minority of opposing votes need not be attended to." Naturally--for he, like other Italians, moves in the circle of papal infallibility which he, as advocate and financier, considers to belong to the "grandes idées de l'Église." He would certainly, if asked, agree with the view of Cardinal Jacobazzi, about 1530, that the Pope could hold an OEcumenical Council with one Bishop only and issue an infallible decree. The state of the case is this: if the decree is published by the Pope with the assent of the majority of the Council, it is ruled that the gift of infallibility has all along resided in the Popes alone, and that the supreme authority in dogmas has only been derived to General Councils from them, whether by their taking part in the proceedings or confirming them. On this theory, even a very considerable number of opposing Bishops have no rights; the Pope could issue a dogmatic decree with the minority against the votes of the majority, for he and he alone would always be the organ of the Holy Ghost. Either no reply will be given to the complaints of the Bishops about the new order of business, any more than to their previous memorials, or they will be told that it is reserved to the Pope to settle whether a decree or _Schema_ voted by a majority only shall be promulgated, since he, being alone infallible, can do what he pleases. In this sense the silence of Section 14 may well be interpreted.