To the inquiries of ambassadors about the reasons for summoning a General Council, Antonelli could only reply by referring to the great revolution and fundamental change in civil and political relations. It may be inferred from this declaration that the Council is intended to discharge a political office also, and in what sense, Rome has told us in the Syllabus and the condemnation of the Austrian Constitution. For this object an ecclesiastico-political consulting committee has been formed, subordinate to the Commission intrusted with the supreme control of the Council, with Cardinal Reisach at its head, and whose Italian members are as conspicuous for their want of scientific culture as for their opposition to any concession to the requirements of the age, and their hostility to all foreign countries, and especially to the non-Roman portions of Italy. The Syllabus will be put into shape in its affirmative form by this Section, in order thus to be submitted for sanction to the Council. One of its members lately expressed himself in the following terms, with the applause of his colleagues and of the Holy Father himself:—“The Syllabus is good, but raw meat, and must be carefully dressed to make it palatable.” This skilful dressing, which is to make it everywhere acceptable, it is hoped to effect by publishing the propositions in the form of exhortations, instead of commands, which, however, will come to the same thing, as the exhortations emanate from the head of the Church. It is with good reason that Prince Hohenlohe, in his despatch, expresses the fear that the Council, according to the programme of the _Curia_, will publish decrees on political rather than ecclesiastical questions, and he rightly states that the projected dogma of Papal Infallibility is also an eminently political question. For when once that is defined, the mediæval pretension of the Pope to dominion over kings and nations, even in secular matters, which has never been abandoned, is thereby also raised to the rank of an article of divine faith. Thiers lately made the remarkable observation that the temporal power alone holds the Pope in check;—a monk, who was Pope, would think himself omnipotent. Certainly, without the temporal power, the maintenance of which depends on the goodwill of the French Government, and the administration of which keeps the Pope within a political area, he would give freer rein, when it was possible, to his views of the corruption of the modern State. Once seat a monk on the Papal throne, as many have already sat there, unacquainted with the actual world, and in heart alienated from it, and arm him with the prerogative of infallibility,—his decrees in the present condition of society are sure to evoke the most deplorable conflicts.