The international Committee of the minority thought it necessary that a treatise should be expressly composed to discuss the weighty question of moral unanimity being required for dogmatic decrees, and Dupanloup has undertaken the task. He had a pamphlet on the subject printed at Naples and laid before the Fathers. He first proves from history that this condition was never wanting in any Councils which count as œcumenical, and was distinctly recognised and maintained at Trent by the Pope himself. He then examines the opinions of the chief theologians of all ages, including St. Vincent of Lerins and St. Augustine, and Popes Leo I., Vigilius and Gregory the Great, who all agree in making moral unanimity an indispensable condition for a decree on faith. He proceeds to observe that in matters of discipline and canon law a numerical majority is enough, as decisions of that kind may be altered afterwards, but for a dogma there must be moral unanimity of the Council and the Churches to whose faith it bears witness, or else Catholicism would be annihilated. But great theologians and theological schools of former ages opposed papal infallibility, and it is opposed now by a large number of Bishops at the Vatican Council representing great Churches and Catholic nations. A Council is only then infallible when the assembled Bishops of the whole Church bear witness to the faith inherited from the beginning. The majority must therefore either convert the minority to their views by free discussion or give up their design; were they to suppress the minority by mere brute force of numbers, that would be unconciliar and unprecedented in Church history. It is not mere probability but unquestionable certainty that is required for defining a dogma, and a considerable number of distinguished members of the Council have no such firm belief in papal infallibility. To define it in spite of this would be to act as judges and masters of faith, not as its depositaries and witnesses. A minority denying a dogma which had been the perpetual belief of the Church would be in the wrong, but not a minority repudiating the definition of a doctrine which had never been held an article of faith. Even the Pope cannot by his authority raise the decision of a mere majority to the dignity of a dogma, for he only promulgates decrees on faith “sacro approbante Concilio,” and without moral unanimity the Council has not approved. The words of the Bishop of Orleans are directed principally against the _Civiltà_, which has notoriously laboured to establish the opposite hypothesis, and he asks, “Are we at a Council or not? If we are, the rules of Councils must be observed, or else a great assembly of Bishops is reduced simply to playing the part of a theatrical exhibition.”