truths. The
case is the same as regards the Ecumenical Councils. Authority in its
most imposing exhibition, grave bishops, laden with the traditions and
rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their
decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and
of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect overruled the
super-human gift which was committed to the Council, which would be a
self-contradictory assertion, but that in that process of inquiry and
deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual
reason was paramount. Thus Malchion, a mere presbyter, was the
instrument of the great Council of Antioch in the third century in
meeting and refuting, for the assembled Fathers, the heretical Patriarch
of that see. Parallel to this instance is the influence, so well known,
of a young deacon, St. Athanasius, with the 318 Fathers at Nicaea. In
mediaeval times we read of St. Anselm at Bari, as the champion of the
Council there held, against the Greeks. At Trent, the writings of St.
Bonaventura, and, what is more to the point, the address of a Priest and
theologian, Salmeron, had a critical effect on some of the definitions
of dogma. In some of those cases the influence might be partly moral,
but in others it was that of a discursive knowledge of ecclesiastical
writers, a scientific acquaintance with theology, and a force of thought
in the treatment of doctrine.

There are of course intellectual habits which theology does not tend to
form, as for instance the experimental, and again the philosophical; but
that is because it _is_ theology, not because of the gift of
infallibility. But, as far as this goes, I think it could be shown that
physical science on the other hand, or again mathematical, affords but
an imperfect training for the intellect. I do not see then how any
objection about the narrowness of theology comes into our question,
which simply is, whether the belief in an infallible authority destroys
the independence of the mind; and I consider that the whole history of
the Church, and especially the history of the theological schools, gives
a negative to the accusation. There never was a time when the intellect
of the educated class was more active, or rather more restless, than in
the middle ages. And then again all through Church history from the
first, how slow is authority in interfering! Perhaps a local teacher, or
a doctor in some local school, hazards a p