decrees anything affecting the welfare, rights, or discipline of the Church. Clearly therefore, henceforth the question will be, not in what cases the Pope is infallible, but what are the few cases where he is not infallible. He, as being infallible, will have the first and only right to determine what is the welfare of the Church, and what it requires. And since, in the whole range of public life, of politics and science, there is scarcely anything not permanently or incidentally connected with the weal of the Church, and with its real or assumed rights and discipline, he will have it in his power to make every secular question a Church question. For it must certainly be anathematized as an error, as the Syllabus says, to affirm that the Pope has exceeded the limits of his power. How can he possibly do so on this theory? He is infallible alike in the definition of doctrine and in its application to concrete cases. He is therefore always right in every claim and every decision, and whoever opposes him, or does not at once unconditionally submit, is always wrong. Whatever demand he makes of any State or Sovereign, whatever law or constitution he abrogates, he must at once be obeyed, for he acts for the good of the Church, and he, as being infallible, can alone judge and settle what that is. The episcopate and clergy must blindly submit to his infallible guidance and serve dutifully under his banner, when he proclaims war against a State, or an institution. Need we explain in detail what painful conflicts with their Governments and the Constitutions they have sworn to, Bishops and clergy, nay all Catholics, might be precipitated into on this system? What caused that lamentable persecution and oppression of Catholics in Great Britain, and their loss of civil privileges for centuries, but Paul V.’s prohibiting their taking the oath of allegiance to their Sovereigns? Although the oath contained nothing against the religious conscience of Catholics, the Pope condemned it because, identifying his own pretensions with the interests of the Church, he thought it intolerable that it denied the power of Popes to depose kings, absolve subjects from their allegiance, and excite revolt and treason against the Sovereign and the State. It is a maxim of the Decretals that no oath against the interests of the Church is binding.(11) But what is for the benefit of the Church the infallible Pope determines. How often have Popes identified their own political interests with the good of the Church, and required and occasioned the breach of oaths and treaties! Thus Innocent III. absolved John from his oath to observe Magna Charta, on his consenting to receive back his crown as a gift from him. When, in the fifteenth century, Eugenius IV. was at war with Francis Sforza, and the general Piccinino had promised not to attack him, the Pope absolved him from his promise, because it was prejudicial to the interests