I will speak first of Cardinal Rauscher’s work, which is the most comprehensive of the three, and touches on many questions passed over in the other two. Written in a calm and dignified tone, it carefully avoids every word or phrase which could offend the _Curia_, and goes to the utmost length in making concessions possible for any one to accept without becoming an infallibilist; but it will nevertheless pour much oil on the flame of anger which has been blazing for weeks past, and singes now one Bishop and now another. Papal infallibility, says the Archbishop of Vienna, must extend to everything ever decided by any Pope, and the whole Christian world must hold with Boniface VIII. and his Bull _Unam Sanctam_ that the Popes have received power from Christ over the whole domain of the State. That will be welcome news to those who want to exclude the Church altogether from civil society. That the Popes themselves in the ancient Church did not hold themselves infallible, that the whole history and conduct of the ancient Church in doctrinal controversies would be an inexplicable riddle on the infallibilist hypothesis, and moreover that the Popes have often fallen into open errors rejected by the Church—all this is well established, though the author cites only some particular facts from the abundant sources he has to draw upon. He then shows the sharp antithesis between the ancient doctrine of the Church and the Popes on the relations of Church and State and the enunciations of Popes since Gregory VII. and Innocent III. With papal infallibility the whole mediæval theory of the unlimited power of Popes to depose kings, absolve from oaths of allegiance, abrogate laws, and interfere in all civil affairs at their will, must be declared to be an immutable doctrine with which the Church stands or falls. The Christian Emperors would have treated such a doctrine as high treason, and even in the days of Charles the Great it would have excited universal astonishment. If this doctrine really had to be preached now to the Christian people, it would be a triumph for the enemies of religion, for the best men would soon be convinced of the utter impossibility of paying any regard to the precepts of the Christian religion in civil matters. The Cardinal proceeds to dwell on the forgeries by which the great master of scholastic theology, the favourite and oracle of all Jesuits and ultramontanes, Thomas Aquinas, was led to adopt the doctrine of infallibility, and how again his influence shaped the whole scholastic system and drew the great Religious Orders, who were bound by oath to maintain his teaching, to adopt it. He concludes in these weighty words:—“If the Pope is declared to be, alone and without the Episcopate, infallible in faith and morals, the Œcumenical Councils are robbed of the authority recognised by Gregory the Great, when he said he honoured them equally with the four Gospels; for they would be and would always have