ns of adherents in every
portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled
in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic
prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one
another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and
confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation
of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with
absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held
as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling
types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of
maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social
order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the
single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from
Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The
opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one
thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal
catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they
questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating
ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the
domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had
decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a
conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and
the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The
Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been
for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what
certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the
ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the
decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane
party was our English Manning.(315)

II

At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.
"Your letter is a very sad one," Mr. Gladstone answered. "I feel as deep
and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my
own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the
one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their
spiritual food." Before Manning left for