necessity; a change in the opinion of
the Church implies a change in the will of God.[376] One of the greatest
Tridentine divines declares that a doctrine must be true if the Church
believes it, without any warrant from Scripture. According to Petavius,
the general belief of Catholics at a given time is the work of God, and
of higher authority than all antiquity and all the Fathers. Scripture
may be silent, and tradition contradictory, but the Church is
independent of both. Any doctrine which Catholic divines commonly
assert, without proof, to be revealed, must be taken as revealed. The
testimony of Rome, as the only remaining apostolic Church, is equivalent
to an unbroken chain of tradition.[377] In this way, after Scripture had
been subjugated, tradition itself was deposed; and the constant belief
of the past yielded to the general conviction of the present. And, as
antiquity had given way to universality, universality made way for
authority. The Word of God and the authority of the Church came to be
declared the two sources of religious knowledge. Divines of this school,
after preferring the Church to the Bible, preferred the modern Church to
the ancient, and ended by sacrificing both to the Pope. "We have not the
authority of Scripture," wrote Prierias in his defence of Indulgences,
"but we have the higher authority of the Roman pontiffs."[378] A bishop
who had been present at Trent confesses that in matters of faith he
would believe a single Pope rather than a thousand Fathers, saints, and
doctors.[379] The divine training develops an orthodox instinct in the
Church, which shows itself in the lives of devout but ignorant men more
than in the researches of the learned, and teaches authority not to need
the help of science, and not to heed its opposition. All the arguments
by which theology supports a doctrine may prove to be false, without
diminishing the certainty of its truth. The Church has not obtained, and
is not bound to sustain it, by proof. She is supreme over fact as over
doctrine, as Fenelon argues, because she is the supreme expounder of
tradition, which is a chain of facts.[380] Accordingly, the organ of one
ultramontane bishop lately declared that infallibility could be defined
without arguments; and the Bishop of Nimes thought that the decision
need not be preceded by long and careful discussion. The Dogmatic
Commission of the Council proclaims that the existence of tradition has
nothing to do with evide