Commission, who are opposed to Jesuit tendencies and practices, have been suffered to retire—several distinguished heads of the Church have renounced the idea of delivering their testimony there. And how is this Council the outcome of any urgent requirements of the Church’s life, and does Catholic Christendom know what end it is designed to serve, and what is to be expected of it? Nothing of the sort. The necessity of the Council, if it will not put its hand to a reformation of the Church, in accordance with the needs of modern civilisation, is not everywhere understood by the clergy themselves. Only this winter wishes were loudly expressed by some of them that its assembling might be dispensed with, considering the position of the Church in Austria and Spain; but in the Holy Father’s state of exaltation on the subject these wishes could have no effect. Then again,—what is perhaps without precedent in all Church history—the the matters to be treated of in the Council have been carefully kept secret; the Bull of Indiction confines itself to vague generalities, and the theologians employed in the preliminary labours were bound to silence by the oath of the Holy Office,—_i.e._, the Inquisition—imposed under pain of excommunication to be incurred _ipso facto_. It seems not to be necessary, therefore, at least for the present, that Christendom should have even any inkling of the doctrines on the acceptance or rejection of which salvation or damnation is to be made dependent. It is not the satisfaction of real religious needs that is contemplated—there would be no need to shun publicity in that case—but chartering dogmas which have no root in the common convictions of the Catholic world. Leibnitz used to call even the Council of Trent a “concile de contrabande;” the way in which this last Council is to be brought on the stage would make the designation for the first time fully applicable. If these circumstances alone are enough to make Governments that have Catholic subjects suspicious of the designs of the _Curia_, there are also further proofs that their designs are not confined to strictly ecclesiastical affairs, but involve direct encroachment on the life of the modern State. Not to dwell here on the too open-hearted confidences of the _Civiltà_, which, although published with the approval of the Holy Father himself, have been characterized by him as an “imprudenza,”(4) we will pass to other facts which sufficiently indicate the projected decrees of the Council.