“Si plus minusve secuerit sine fraude esto,” was said in the old Roman law which allowed a creditor to cut a pound of flesh from the body of his debtor, and so do the knives of the Jesuits and curialists cut right into the flesh of history. The Acts of the Sixth Council were said to have been corrupted through the perfidy of the Greeks, and the whole history and even the letters of Honorius to be forgeries. The Popes themselves, Rome, and the whole West had let themselves be fooled by the cunning Greeks into condemning an innocent and orthodox Pope as a heretic, and the letters of Pope Leo II. must also be forgeries. In short these reasoners were caught in the meshes of their own net, and when in 1660 Lucas Holstein got the Roman _Liber Diurnus_ printed—an excellent edition of which Rozière lately brought out in Paris—the whole impression was suppressed, for it contained the old form of oath which expressly attested the condemnation of Honorius. But twenty years later the book appeared to the great chagrin of Rome, and the infallibilist school had to change their front. They now turned to the letters of Honorius and tried to show that they were perfectly orthodox. But that did not touch the fact that a General Council had solemnly condemned a Pope for heresy, and that the whole Church—the Popes and the Roman Church included—had accepted the sentence without demur. Hefele has shortly and pointedly exposed the shifts and dishonesties of this long controversy carried on in more than a hundred polemical works; and he has taken care, at the same time, to establish conclusively the wide-reaching facts and general results of the inquiry. He shows (page 11), how up to the eleventh century every Pope swore to the truth that an Œcumenical Council had condemned a Pope for heresy.(87)