Desertions from the ranks of the Opposition to the majority of 500, must, no doubt, be reckoned on, and the renegades will say, like Talleyrand, that they are not deserting, but only coming in earlier than others. Whether these desertions will be numerous enough to reduce the minority to 40 or 50, as the authorities hope, will be determined when the question of opportuneness gets disentangled from the question of principle. For it requires more than common courage to make open profession of disbelief in the Infallibilist dogma at Rome, since the Pope, in his letters to Manning and Deschamps, has indulged in severe censures of those who question his infallibility; and every Cardinal and Monsignore is accustomed to express himself in the same sense. Can this Council, then, which can move neither hand nor foot, be called free? Is an assembly free, when no speech can be made, no single decision come to, without the express permission of an external master? If this is freedom, there has never been an unfree Council. So I hear many saying, as well clergy as laity, and even Bishops. The Pope, of course, has not forgotten that, on the day of his election, sitting on the High Altar of that very church where the Council is now being held, he was adored by the Cardinals, and four days afterwards crowned with the triple tiara, with the words, “Scias te esse rectorem orbis.” It has been summoned to arrange and negotiate the transition from the previous condition of the Church to a new one. Till now, at least in theory, Councils were, or were supposed to be, assemblies deliberating and deciding freely. But, in the new condition of the Church, under the rule of Papal Infallibility, assemblies of Bishops are purely superfluous, or only useful as machines for acclamation. The present assembly stands midway between the old Church and the new, and participates in both. The vital breath of freedom and independence it is deprived of, but it is not yet a mere acclamation-machine: it can still dissent and say, _Non placet_. On the day when the new dogma is proclaimed, and the eternal city again, as in 1517,(22) declares its joy by illuminations, the Synod will have killed itself with its own hand, and marched into the grave as the last of its generation. And just as when a knight died the last of his race, his shield was broken and his arms obliterated, so will the usual chapter _De Conciliis_ be obliterated from the dogmatic manuals. FIFTH LETTER.