ops were bewildered and dispirited by
the Bull _Multiplices_. They feared that a struggle could not be
averted, as, even if no dogmatic question was raised, their rights were
cancelled in a way that would make the Pope absolute in dogma. One of
the Cardinals caused him to be informed that the Regulation would be
resisted. But Pius IX. knew that in all that procession of 750 bishops
one idea prevailed. Men whose word is powerful in the centres of
civilisation, men who three months before were confronting martyrdom
among barbarians, preachers at Notre Dame, professors from Germany,
Republicans from Western America, men with every sort of training and
every sort of experience, had come together as confident and as eager as
the prelates of Rome itself, to hail the Pope infallible. Resistance was
improbable, for it was hopeless. It was improbable that bishops who had
refused no token of submission for twenty years would now combine to
inflict dishonour on the Pope. In their address of 1867 they had
confessed that he is the father and teacher of all Christians; that all
the things he has spoken were spoken by St. Peter through him; that they
would believe and teach all that he believed and taught. In 1854 they
had allowed him to proclaim a dogma, which some of them dreaded and some
opposed, but to which all submitted when he had decreed without the
intervention of a Council. The recent display of opposition did not
justify serious alarm. The Fulda bishops feared the consequences in
Germany; but they affirmed that all were united, and that there would be
no new dogma. They were perfectly informed of all that was being got
ready in Rome. The words of their pastoral meant nothing if they did not
mean that infallibility was no new dogma, and that all the bishops
believed in it. Even the Bishop of Orleans avoided a direct attack on
the doctrine, proclaimed his own devotion to the Pope, and promised that
the Council would be a scene of concord.[384] It was certain that any
real attempt that might be made to prevent the definition could be
overwhelmed by the preponderance of those bishops whom the modern
constitution of the Church places in dependence on Rome.

The only bishops whose position made them capable of resisting were the
Germans and the French; and all that Rome would have to contend with was
the modern liberalism and decrepit Gallicanism of France, and the
science of Germany. The Gallican school was nearly extinct; it had