It would be hard, if not impossible, for a liberal mind to find fault with these propositions. They were so generally accepted as fair that any comment upon them is unnecessary. They encountered no objection--except from those who preferred that the pope should remain an absolute temporal monarch, with full power to make and unmake all the laws--to a constitutional government representing the people. They were made by a Roman Catholic king, representing and speaking for several millions of Roman Catholic people, and, besides being in a conciliatory and kindly spirit, bore upon their face conclusive evidence of sincerity. If they had been accepted by the pope, the true faith of the Church would have been untouched, and the pope in the full possession of all his rightful and necessary spiritual powers. The Church, in fact, would have been brought back to its primitive condition before the fall of the Roman Empire. But Pius IX, instead of reciprocating the generosity of the king, mourned over the "deep sorrow," which filled his "life with bitterness," and, at the same time, treated the propositions of the king with intense scorn. He was then the first pope, in all the long history of the Church, who had been allowed authoritatively to avow his own personal infallibility. He had convened the celebrated Council of the Vatican, in which, but a few weeks before, the Jesuits had succeeded in having him declared infallible by the passage of a decree dictated by himself, and secured by the suppression of debate, against the protest of a number of bishops, including several from the United States.[188] Having obtained this victory over the liberalism of the Church, and thus thrown himself completely into the arms of the Jesuits, and preferring an alliance with them to union with millions of Roman Catholics who favored a constitutional government, he made it impossible to take a single step towards conciliation, or to carry on even an amicable discussion with the king. He manifestly felt as if no human power had the right to demand or to expect conciliation or discussion from an infallible pope. The Council had affirmed his universal sovereignty, and had encouraged him in the belief that he possessed the power of omnipotence, so that those who refused obedience to him were under the curse of God. The time for debate, therefore, had passed with him, and no longer were thoughts of peace and conciliation to be entertained. Consequently, he is represented by a friendly pen as having, with an air of imperial majesty, broken off the official interview with the envoy of Victor Emmanuel, by expressing "the full measure of his scorn and indignation" in these expressive words: "_In the name of Jesus Christ, I tell you that you are all whited sepulchers!_"[189]