barbarians"--with a contemptuous leer, gape at the queer spectacle of the "Vicegerent on Earth" of an all-powerful God being obliged so easily to succumb to heresy--to a little temporal power. Such, however, is life--or rather the "mysterious ways of providence," which "ways" always seem though, as Cromwell observed, to be on the side of the heaviest artillery,--not the artillery of heaven, but the base artillery of earth. Indeed, this worldly artillery--the artillery of science and civilization--has, in this nineteenth century, been making such havoc with creeds, confessions, and dogmas, that the crowning dogma of all--this fundamental pillar of the Vatican, the dogma of infallibility--was, it would seem, fast becoming a _dead dog_; when the Holy Catholic Church finds it imperatively incumbent upon her to attempt a resuscitation. This happened in Rome in "_anno domini_" 1870, at that great Ecumenical Council--that unique anachronism of the nineteenth century. I know not whether that mediæval assembly of Holy "Fathers in God" was honored by the presence of his Grace of St. Michael's Palace, in Toronto, or not; but, be that as it may, his reverence's entire loyalty to the notorious Encyclical and Syllabus of that Council is not to be questioned or doubted. The miniature Toronto _bull_ of May 9th, 1880, has the true Vatican ring of the big _bull_ of the Council in Rome in 1870. It, too, denounced, with its usual, though harmless, _anathema_, Atheism, Pantheism, Naturalism, Rationalism and every other ism that failed to square with Papal dogma. By the fulmination of that Syllabus the world learned among many other things, that "No one may interpret the Sacred Scriptures contrary to the sense in which they are interpreted by Holy Mother Church, to whom such interpretation belongs." It was further decreed that "All the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend, as legitimate conclusions of science, those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth." As examples of the holy canons which were actually fulminated and promulgated by that Ecumenical Council in the latter part of this 19th century, here are a few:-- "Who shall refuse to receive, for sacred and canonical, the books of Holy Scripture in their integrity, with all their parts, according as they were enumerated by the Holy Council of Trent, or shall deny that they are inspired by God, _Let him be anathema_." "Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine, _Let him be anathema_."