right bait might be discovered among them. SEVENTEENTH LETTER. _Rome, Feb. 5._—To supplement and partly to verify the news in my last letter, I will now tell you some facts that came to light yesterday and the day before. The Opposition Addresses were presented to the Pope on January 26, subscribed by forty-six Germans and Hungarians, thirty French, and twenty Italian Bishops, together with some of the North American Bishops, the Portuguese, and certain others. Cardinal Barnabo had employed all available means of intimidation to prevent the Orientals from signing, and hence the number of signatures was somewhat below what had been expected. Of the Germans, Martin, Senestrey, Stahl and Leonrod had signed the Infallibilist Address, which, as was only afterwards discovered, has not been presented, because—it was countermanded. It is not, as I first informed you, composed by the Episcopal Committee, but by the Jesuits, and emanates from the bureau of the _Civiltà_; the abiding marvel is that 400 Bishops could be induced to sign such a document without even verifying a single one of the pretended facts cited in it. That an Infallibilist should subscribe in blind confidence, and without examination, a document coming from the Pope himself, is natural; but that 400 pastors of the Church, assembled for deciding and therefore for examining ecclesiastical questions, should endorse on faith the composition of a nameless Jesuit, is an occurrence the Order may pride itself on. A Petition has been set on foot by the Jesuits, and hawked about with the Pope’s approval, proposing that the bodily Assumption of the Mother of the Lord should be made an article of faith, and all who henceforth doubt of it, or point to the notorious origin of the notion from apocryphal writings, be anathematized. This anathema would inevitably fall on every one who is acquainted with Church history and patristic literature. This passionate delight in anathemas, curses and refusals of absolution has been powerfully aroused, as you may see from the canons which reproduce the Syllabus and are added to the third _Schema_. The augurs of the Gesù do not indeed smile, but simper, when they meet each other, for they know that the rich harvest from these seeds will drop into the bosom of their Order. Here again it is shown plainly that the interests of the Bishops and of the Jesuits are sharply opposed. That Bull, with its many curses and cases reserved to the Pope, which fills the Jesuits with hope and joy (though not they but the Dominicans of the Inquisition are its authors), is for the Bishops a source of discouragement and despair, so that the Bishop of Trent is said to have lately observed that he would rather resign his See than publish it. It is now asserted that the Pope has again suspended it, partly on account of remonstrances of the French Government, partly to put the Bishops in better humour for the Infallibilist definition.