absolution, and are thus made indispensable, and placed in a very superior position to the secular clergy. Moreover, the Bishops are deprived of the power of absolving from these censures. So each of these multiplied excommunications is worth its weight in gold to the Order, and helps to build Colleges and Professed Houses. The Bull containing directions in the event of the Pope’s death occurring during the Council was not issued by Pius IX. from any real anxiety to provide for such an occurrence,—for he enjoys the best health, and in all probability will falsify the old proverb, “Non numerabis annos Petri.”(23) No one really supposed the Council would claim the right of electing in Conclave, as occurred once under totally different circumstances, after the deposition of a Pope (John XXIII.) at Constance. The real point of the document lies in the declaration that the Council is to be at once dissolved on the Pope’s death, as a corpse from which the soul has departed. And this is a decisive intimation of the relations not only of the dead but of the living Pope to the Council. The Bull might be summed up in the words, “Without me you are nothing, and against me and my will you can do nothing.” The opposition of German and French Bishops to the new dogma was more or less anticipated here; what was not expected was that the Orientals, numbering about sixty, and the North American Bishops, would pronounce against it. The former declare openly that no surer means could be found to throw back their Churches into schism, and place them under the holy Synod in St. Petersburg or the Patriarch in Stamboul. The Americans ask how they are to live under the free Constitutions of their Republic, and maintain their position of equality with their (Protestant) fellow-citizens, after committing themselves to the principles attested by Papal Infallibility, such as religious persecution and the coercive power of the Church, the claim of Catholicism to exclusive mastery in the State, the Pope’s right to dispense from oaths, the subjection of the civil power to his supreme dominion, etc. The inevitable result would be that Catholics would be looked upon and treated as pariahs in the United States, that all religious parties would be banded together against them as common enemies, and would endeavour, as far as possible, to exclude them from public offices. One of the American Bishops lately said, “Nobody should be elected Pope who has not lived three years in the United States, and thus learnt to comprehend what is possible at this day in a freely governed Commonwealth.”