Statements of mine will frequently be found to conflict with statements made in the _True Story_. In most of those cases--I hope in all--the materials from known sources furnished to the general reader will suffice for a not unsatisfactory comparison, while the authorities indicated will enable the scholar to form a judgment. In very many of these cases statements of Cardinal Manning, made in previous works and virtually amounting to the same as the most material of those made in the _True Story_, will be found side by side with the statements of other authorities, with official documents, or with facts no longer disputable. Of these statements, one to which the Cardinal seems to attach much importance is his assertion that none of the prelates, or at most a number under five, disbelieved or denied the dogma of Papal infallibility, and that all their objections turned on questions of prudence. This is not a slip, nor a hasty assertion, and it is very far from being peculiar to Cardinal Manning. It is now the harmonious refrain of all that hierarchy of strange witnesses of which he has made himself a part. The point is one on which illustrations will occur again and again, in events, in words, and in those documents which, in spite of all precautions, have been gained to publicity. Notwithstanding the method adopted in the _True Story_, the fact crops out at every turn that the modern strife of the Papacy is not to make men and women, as such, godly and peaceable, but to bring kings as kings, and legislatures as legislatures, and nations as nations, into subjection to the Pope. It crops out sufficiently, at least, to be obvious to all who know the difference, in the Cardinal's phraseology, between the two sets of terms employed to indicate those two distinct objects. For instance, what an excellent description of that _Catholic Civilization_ which, in the great contest of the Vatican, is ever signalized as the goal, does the Cardinal give when, picturing the "public life and laws and living organization of Christendom" in the times when all these, according to his ideas, were "Christian," he says, "_Princes and legislatures and society_ professed the Catholic faith, and were _subject to the head_ of the Catholic Church." Cardinal Manning does not here use the word "society" in the domestic but in the political sense. He means, not families or social parties, but nations--as the Jesuit writers almost always do. Any one may, therefore, possess himself of a key to the true meaning of many pious phrases which occur in the following pages, if he will first of all clearly realize in his own thoughts just what it would involve for England; and for us were the conditions stated by the Cardinal fulfilled by our princes, our legislature, and our "society." One seeking to do this must realize the fact that the prince and the legislature not as individuals, and the "society" not in its separate members, but the prince as a prince, the legislature as a