Two interesting episodes have intervened. Last week the police refused the Prince Bishop of Breslau his _visa_ for Naples, because he could show no permission from the Presidents of the Council to go there. This implied that the Fathers are civil as well as spiritual subjects of the Pope. The Bishop, who was wearied out with the objectless proceedings in the Council Hall, sent to Fessler, the Secretary of the Council, for the requisite permission; Fessler replied that he could not give it, and referred him to the President de Angelis, who tried to represent the whole affair as a mistake. It had not been so ill meant, and at most only the departure of the Orientals was intended to be prevented, he said, and he authorized Fessler to instruct the police to give the permission. But that was the most complete indorsing of what they had done, and proved that the Pope meant to use his temporal power for managing the Council and controlling the actions of the Fathers. On that account the departure of the Prince Bishop had been hindered, and the whole affair involves the question of ecclesiastical freedom and international right. Does a member of the Council thereby lose or prejudice his rights as the subject of a foreign state, or is the freedom of individual Bishops suspended while taking part in it? So anxious is the Pope to give up nothing which may serve for dominating the Council, that he restricts the Bishops in the most harmless exercise of personal freedom, which at other times he would never have thought of. I will not dwell on the insult in this procedure to the King of Prussia, whose safe-conduct was no more respected than the Emperor Sigismund’s at Constance, for a graver question is at stake,—that of international right and freedom of the Council. Meanwhile they reckon on Prussia taking no further notice of the affair, and the Prince Bishop has given up his journey after these difficulties. France, too, has quietly endured a series of insults, and so they hope not to have to abolish the regulation or disavow the police. Rome cannot admit the principle of international right in this case, without giving up one of her own principles, the Inquisition, according to whose laws foreigners can be arrested, imprisoned, and put to the question. No secular tribunal limits its power, and every Bishop therefore could in theory be brought before it. By papal law the Pope might at any moment have Cardinal Schwarzenberg arrested, and if the right has become inapplicable, that is due to the influence of foreign states and the modern spirit, whose restraints on the full exercise of Church authority it is the office of the Council to remove, as the Syllabus, Bull of Censures, _Schema de Ecclesiâ_, etc., prove. According to Roman canon law, freedom at the Council is inconceivable.