continue to adhere to their negative vote, but from reverence and respect for the person of the pope they declined to give effect to it at a public session. On the following day, July 18th, the fourth and last public sitting was held: 547 fathers voted _placet_ and only two, Riccio of Cajazzo and Fitzgerald of Little Rock, _non placet_. A violent storm had broken out during the session and amid thunder and lightning, Pius IX., like “a second Moses” (Exod. xix. 16), proclaimed in the _Pastor æternus_ the absolute plenipotence and infallibility of himself and all his predecessors and successors.--It was on the evening preceding the proclamation of this new dogma that Napoleon III. proclaimed war with Prussia, in consequence of which the pope lost the last remnants of temporal sovereignty and every chance of its restoration. Under the influence of the fever-fraught July sun, the council now dwindled down to 150 members, and, after the whole glory of the papal kingdom had gone down (§ 185, 3), on October 20th, its sittings were suspended until better times. The _schema_ of discipline and the preliminary sketch of a catechism were not concluded; a subsequently introduced _schema_ on apostolic missions was left in the same state; and a petition equally pressed by the Jesuits for the defining of the corporeal ascension of Mary had not even reached the initial stage. § 189.4. =Acceptance of the Decrees of the Council.=--All protests which during the council the minority had made against the order of business determined on and against all irregularities resulting from it, because not persisted in, were regarded as invalid. Equally devoid of legal force was their final written protest which they left behind, in which they expressly declined to exercise their right of voting. And the assent which they ultimately without exception gave to the objective standpoint of the law and the faith of the Catholic church, was not in the least necessary in order to make it appear that the decisions of the council, drawn up with such unanimity as had scarcely ever before been seen, were equally valid with any of the decrees of the older councils. Thus the bishops of the minority, if they did not wish to occasion a split of unexampled dimensions and incalculable complications, quarrels, and contentions in the church that boasted of a unity which had hitherto been its strength and stay, could do nothing else than yield at the twelfth hour to the pope’s demand that “_sacrificio dell’intelletto_” which at the eleventh hour they had refused. The German bishops, who had proved most steadfast at the council, were now in the greatest haste to make their submission. Even by the end of August, at Fulda, they joined their infallibilist neighbours in addressing a pastoral letter, in which they most solemnly declared that all true Catholics, as they valued their