ssary for the very life
of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that
the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of
Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied
operation of the Reason, from within and without, and provokes again
a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the
State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the
encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner
Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism,
but it presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private
Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of
the tide;--it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful
intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty
and the majesty of a superhuman power--into what may be called a
large reformatory or training-school, not to be sent to bed, not to
be buried alive, but for the melting, refining, and moulding, as in
some moral factory, by an incessant noisy process (if I may proceed
to another metaphor), of the raw material of human nature, so
excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

St. Paul says in one place that his apostolical power is given him to
edification, and not to destruction. There can be no better account
of the Infallibility of the Church. It is a supply for a need, and it
does not go beyond that need. Its object is, and its effect also,
not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious
speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance. What have
been its great works? All of them in the distinct province of
theology:--to put down Arianism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism,
Manichaeism, Lutheranism, Jansenism. Such is the broad result of its
action in the past;--and now as to the securities which are given us
that so it ever will act in time to come.

First, infallibility cannot act outside of a definite circle of
thought, and it must in all its decisions, or _definitions_, as they
are called, profess to be keeping within it. The great truths of the
moral law, of natural religion, and of apostolical faith, are both
its boundary and its foundation. It must not go beyond them, and it
must ever appeal to them. Both its subject-matter, and its articles
in that subject-matter, are fixed. Thus, in illustration, it does not
extend to statements, however sound and evident, which are mere