speculating on his speedy death. It would be another thing, at the very moment of his glorious triumph over the Council and after gaining infallibility, to resign it, to decline to enjoy his success, to renounce this mighty power in the first moment of fruition, and to transfer the splendid inheritance to the hands of a younger man. Thus next June might witness the most brilliant jubilee, and an example be given of such imposing grandeur that the world has seen nothing like it, of such wisdom and eventful significance that the present system would be immortalized and become the heirloom of the Papacy for all ages. The Pope would retire into a glorious privacy, like the founder of the North American Republic after his second Presidentship, and taste the honours of an ex-Pope, unequalled by any former ceremonial splendour, and close his days in a position of unprecedented elevation. This seductive dream has found little aliment in the course of the Council hitherto. The plan would be at bottom a conspiracy against existing law, against Cardinals, Governments, and the Episcopate, and notwithstanding its dazzling lustre, would make the very worst impression on the Council. A victorious Pope might conceivably attempt to carry it out, but in the present situation it would be a dangerous challenge. The abdication of a Pope is not without precedent in history. In 1294 a Pope took this step, which has never since been repeated; Celestine V. resigned the papal office, to which he felt himself unequal. After a long and quarrelsome Conclave, the Cardinals, at their wits’ end, had elected the pious recluse of Einsiedlen, and dragged him from his mountain home; a few months later they got tired of him and urged him to abdicate, and he complied. Many doubted whether a Pope could resign; they thought that, according to the law established by the Popes themselves in the decretals, no Pope could dissolve of his own power the bond which unites him to the Church and the Church to him. It would require a superior in the hierarchy to do this, and none such exists. It had first therefore to be decided that a Pope could resign, and Celestine settled this by a special Bull. After that he solemnly and publicly laid down his office. Boniface VIII. succeeded, who shut up the unfortunate man in a mountain fastness, where he died soon afterwards in a damp unhealthy dungeon.