Forty years before this English controversy, a great French Catholic found himself in this dilemma. No man had more consistently maintained the duty of submission to the Pope than Lamennais. His hard fight for religious liberty in France was precisely for the right of the Catholic to render the Pope a full and undivided allegiance in all matters relating to the content and practice of faith. But a time came when the Pope came to exact from Lamennais a submission he was unable to make. As he would not allow the state to have jurisdiction in the spiritual sphere, so he denied to the Pope jurisdiction in the civil. The Pope would not consent to this modification of his claim to authority and demanded of Lamennais an unqualified submission. Whereupon Lamennais replied, “Most Holy Father, a word from your Holiness is always enough for me, not only to obey it in all that religion ordains but to comply with it in all that conscience allows.”[26] “Outside the Church,” he wrote to the Countess de Senfft, “in the strictly temporal order, and more particularly in that which touches the affairs of my country, I do not recognise any authority which has the right to impose an opinion upon me or to dictate my conduct. I say it emphatically, in that sphere which is not that of the spiritual power, I will never renounce my independence as a man; nor will I, for thought or action, ever take counsel but of my conscience and my reason.”[27] In this course, Lamennais followed the judgment of Cardinal Jacobatus, in what Newman calls his “authoritative work upon councils.” “If it were doubtful whether a precept (of the Pope) be a sin or not, we must determine thus: that if he to whom the precept is addressed has a conscientious sense that it is a sin and injustice; first, it is his duty to put off that sense; but if he cannot nor conform himself to the judgment of the Pope, in that case it is his duty to follow his own private conscience, and patiently to bear it if the Pope punishes him.”[28] Footnote 26: Boutard, _Lamennais, sa via et ses doctrines II._, p. 382. Footnote 27: _Ibid_, II., p. 370. Footnote 28: Quoted in Newman, _Letter to the Duke of Norfolk_, p. 85. Nevertheless, when Lamennais followed the instances of his conscience, Pope Gregory XVI. in the Bull _Mirari vos_ took occasion to describe “liberty of conscience” as “cette maxime absurde et erronée,” “cette pernicieuse erreur,” “cette liberté funeste.”