ur words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I
shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of
which the title would probably be, "The Vatican Decrees in their
bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation." I incline
to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and
will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit
by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of the MS. as
your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be
that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations
with Doellinger.

V

(M164) The pamphlet(320) appeared in November, and was meant for an
argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old
historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the
episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of
absolutist centralisation, which in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous
life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even
denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and
his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the
Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church
was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth
century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent XI. in
the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement XIV., exactly a hundred
years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and "levelled in the dust the
deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known." From July
1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its
death-warrant signed and sealed. The "myrmidons of the apostolic chamber"
had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims
were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864
had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration
of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things
independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally
contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the
church.

(M165) "It has been a favourite purpose of my life," Mr. Gladstone said,
"not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going
to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the