not aware of the real state of things, and was evidently deceived by
false reports.[346] A few months later came the necessity for a further
distinction between the Pontiff and the Sovereign. If the doctrines of
the _Avenir_ had caused displeasure at Rome, it was only on political
grounds. If the Pope was offended, he was offended not as Vicar of
Christ, but as a temporal monarch implicated in the political system of
Europe. In his capacity of spiritual head of the Church he could not
condemn writers for sacrificing all human and political considerations
to the supreme interests of the Church, but must in reality agree with
them.[347] As the Polish Revolution brought the political questions into
greater prominence, Lamennais became more and more convinced of the
wickedness of those who surrounded Gregory XVI., and of the political
incompetence of the Pope himself. He described him as weeping and
praying, motionless, amidst the darkness which the ambitious, corrupt,
and frantic idiots around him were ever striving to thicken.[348] Still
he felt secure. When the foundations of the Church were threatened, when
an essential doctrine was at stake, though, for the first time in
eighteen centuries, the supreme authority might refuse to speak,[349] at
least it could not speak out against the truth. In this belief he made
his last journey to Rome. Then came his condemnation. The staff on which
he leaned with all his weight broke in his hands; the authority he had
so grossly exaggerated turned against him, and his faith was left
without support. His system supplied no resource for such an emergency.
He submitted, not because he was in error, but because Catholics had no
right to defend the Church against the supreme will even of an erring
Pontiff.[350] He was persuaded that his silence would injure religion,
yet he deemed it his duty to be silent and to abandon theology. He had
ceased to believe that the Pope could not err, but he still believed
that he could not lawfully be disobeyed. In the two years during which
he still remained in the Church his faith in her system fell rapidly to
pieces. Within two months after the publication of the Encyclical he
wrote that the Pope, like the other princes, seemed careful not to omit
any blunder that could secure his annihilation.[351] Three weeks
afterwards he denounced in the fiercest terms the corruption of Rome. He
predicted that the ecclesiastical hierarchy was about to depart with the