build up the edifice, are once for all got rid of and destroyed, at least within the Church. No Catholic will any longer venture to appeal to them, and if he is an historical student, he will only be able to console himself by saying, _Credo, quia absurdum_. The dogma has triumphed over history, as Manning has so admirably explained in his last Pastoral. Their favourite argument is the common one about increasing the strength and security of the coercive power of the Church. The Bishops are told that the personal infallibility of the Pope will make not only him but them, his delegates and plenipotentiaries, much more powerful, and that under its shadow they will rule with a stronger hand, for resistance will, in most cases, be blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, speaking through the Pope and his chosen instruments. Who, for instance, would any longer dare to defend a book condemned by the Congregation of the Index, after it had become infallible? On the other hand, the Bishops have their scruples, and some of them may be heard saying that this would be a poor consolation for losing half their episcopal authority, and that it is hard to ask them to degrade themselves, and renounce their former dignity as the supreme tribunal of faith, by making the Pope infallible. It might not be pleasant to return home from the Council with the consciousness of having themselves abdicated at Rome the best, and what has hitherto been held in the Church the highest, part of their authority, and burned it as a holocaust on the altar of Papal autocracy. The _rôle_ of a Papal courtier, however convenient at Rome, has its dark side north of the Alps.