ctrine. And it is an objection which I
embrace as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its
extraordinary gift. It is said, and truly, that the Church of Rome
possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution.
Afterwards for a long while, it has not a single doctor to show; St.
Leo, its first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine; St. Gregory,
who stands at the very extremity of the first age of the Church, has
no place in dogma or philosophy. The great luminary of the western
world is, as we know, St. Augustine; he, no infallible teacher, has
formed the intellect of Europe; indeed to the African Church
generally we must look for the best early exposition of Latin ideas.
The case is the same as regards the ecumenical councils. Authority
in its most imposing exhibition, grave bishops, laden with the
traditions and rivalries of particular nations or places, have been
guided in their decisions by the commanding genius of individuals,
sometimes young and of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect
overruled the super-human gift which was committed to the council,
which would be a self-contradictory assertion, but that in that
process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible
enunciation, individual reason was paramount. Thus the writings of
St. Bonaventura, and, what is more to the point, the address of a
priest and theologian, Salmeron, at Trent, had a critical effect on
some of the definitions of dogmas. Parallel to this is the influence,
so well known, of a young deacon, St. Athanasius, with the 318
Fathers at Nicaea. In like manner we hear of the influence of St.
Anselm at Bari, and St. Thomas at Lyons. In the latter cases the
influence might be partly moral, but in the former it was that of a
discursive knowledge of ecclesiastical writers, a scientific
acquaintance with theology, and a force of thought in the treatment
of doctrine.

There are of course intellectual habits which theology does not
tend to form, as for instance the experimental, and again the
philosophical; but that is because it _is_ theology, not because of
the gift of infallibility. But, as far as this goes, I think it could
be shown that physical science on the other hand, or mathematical,
affords but an imperfect training for the intellect. I do not see
then how any objection about the narrowness of theology comes into
our question, which simply is, whether the belief in an infallible
authority destr