It is absolutely impossible for any one, who feels compelled by his own investigation of history to answer these three questions in the negative, to submit inwardly to the opposite decision of the Council, whatever external homage he may pay to it. Ten Councils will not be able to shake him for a moment in his conviction; he will only say, “pur si muove.” His doubts will be turned, not against what is historically certain but against the Council; he will call in question the real freedom, the intrinsic claims and authority of this Council, and—to go no further—the two successive regulations for conducting business supply in this case abundant materials for the question. And it is just as impossible for a man who has a notion of historical certainty to believe in any one else’s mind being changed by the decree of an assembly of Bishops. If a well-educated man told me he had just come to the conclusion that Julius Cæsar never lived, I should not believe in his conviction but in some disorder of his mental faculties, and should advise him to undergo medical treatment. And so, if the new dogma is proclaimed and the clergy submit either tacitly or expressly, no cultivated man in all Germany will believe that the thousands of scientifically trained men who have had a German education have suddenly changed their convictions, because some hundreds of Italians and Spaniards have chosen to decree away the testimony of history. “Facts are stubborn things.” Public opinion will recognise only two alternatives in the case of those who submit, ignorance or dissimulation and falsehood. And the effect will be an immeasurable moral degradation of the Catholic clergy and a corresponding decay of their influence. This consideration will not of course make the slightest impression on the majority of the Council, or even on those Germans who belong to it. We have psychological riddles to deal with here. How, _e.g._, are we to explain the fact that a man, who has taught the very opposite doctrine in a manual of instruction for the higher class of colleges published seventeen years ago, and has let it pass through eleven or twelve editions without a word being altered, is now in Rome one of the most zealous promoters of the definition, and is constantly affirming that all the clergy except a few professors will readily submit? FORTY-SECOND LETTER.