they took courage in extremity.
Rauscher, Schwarzenberg, Hefele, Ketteler, Kenrick, wrote pamphlets, or
caused them to be written, against the dogma, and circulated them in the
Council. Several English bishops protested that the denial of
infallibility by the Catholic episcopate had been an essential condition
of emancipation, and that they could not revoke that assurance after it
had served their purpose, without being dishonoured in the eyes of their
countrymen.[394] The Archbishop of St. Louis, admitting the force of the
argument, derived from the fact that a dogma was promulgated in 1854
which had long been disputed and denied, confessed that he could not
prove the Immaculate Conception to be really an article of faith.[395]

An incident occurred in June which showed that the experience of the
Council was working a change in the fundamental convictions of the
bishops. Doellinger had written in March that an article of faith
required not only to be approved and accepted unanimously by the
Council, but that the bishops united with the Pope are not infallible,
and that the oecumenicity of their acts must be acknowledged and
ratified by the whole Church. Father Hoetzl, a Franciscan friar, having
published a pamphlet in defence of this proposition, was summoned to
Rome, and required to sign a paper declaring that the confirmation of a
Council by the Pope alone makes it oecumenical. He put his case into the
hands of German bishops who were eminent in the opposition, asking first
their opinion on the proposed declaration, and, secondly, their advice
on his own conduct. The bishops whom he consulted replied that they
believed the declaration to be erroneous; but they added that they had
only lately arrived at the conviction, and had been shocked at first by
Doellinger's doctrine. They could not require him to suffer the
consequences of being condemned at Rome as a rebellious friar and
obstinate heretic for a view which they themselves had doubted only
three months before. He followed the advice, but he perceived that his
advisers had considerately betrayed him.

When the observations on infallibility which the bishops had sent in to
the Commission appeared in print it seemed that the minority had burnt
their ships. They affirmed that the dogma would put an end to the
conversion of Protestants, that it would drive devout men out of the
Church and make Catholicism indefensible in controversy, that it would
give governments a