_Rome, June 3, 1870._—Valerga attacked the “Gallicans,” drawing a parallel between the Pope and Christ, and between the Fallibilists and Monothelites. As in Christ the human will co-existed with the divine, so in the Pope may personal infallibility co-exist with moral sinfulness, and to conclude from the former against the latter—to draw an argument from scandals in papal history against the _privilegium inerrantiæ_—is analogous to the error of the Monothelites, who denied the possibility of a human will subject to sin co-existing with the divine will in the same person. Never has the well-known spirit of the Roman _Curia_ shown itself so openly and with such technical adroitness as in this carefully elaborated and minute accusation against the Opposition. As Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati expressed it, it was “exemplum sophismatum artis ad instar congestorum,” and great expectations might be formed of its salutary effect on the French. Purcell answered shortly and pointedly that the charge applied equally to the Council of Trent and the sixth, seventh, and eighth Œcumenical Councils, and that he and his colleagues were content to endure the patriarch’s anathema in such good company. Even Bellarmine quotes a whole cloud of witnesses against infallibilism, and neither he nor later writers had refuted them. It is a matter of thankfulness to God that he has never suffered this opinion to gain dogmatic authority. Purcell then cited clenching proofs of the public erroneous teaching of Popes, and among them the history of the ordinations and reordinations of Formosus and Sergius. The standpoint which he took as a republican was interesting. He said that the Church was the freest society in the world, and was loved as such by its American sons, for the Americans abhorred every doctrine opposed to civil and spiritual freedom. As kings existed for the good of the peoples, so Popes for the good of the Church, and not _vice versâ_. Perhaps he was thinking of the words of the absolutist Louis XIV., “La nation ne fait pas corps en France, elle réside tout entière dans la personne du roi.” For “nation” put “Église,” and the words describe precisely the papal system, as it is now intended to be made exclusively dominant by means of the Council.