and labour to such ends! For, while the offence remained ambiguous, there was no ambiguity about the penalty. One hair's breadth from the unknown path of truth, one shadow of impurity in the mysterious light of faith—and there shall be anathema! anathema! anathema! When the framers of such edicts called upon the bowels of Christ to justify them, might they not have done well to have paused a little, and to have called to mind the counsel of another sovereign ruler, though a heretic—Oliver Cromwell? "Bethink ye, bethink ye, in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken!"
One of the secondary results of the Council was the excommunication of Dr. Döllinger and a few more of the most uncompromising of the Inopportunists. Among these, however, Lord Acton was not included. Nobody ever discovered why. Was it because he was too important for the Holy See to care to interfere with him? Or was it because he was not important enough?
Another ulterior consequence was the appearance of a pamphlet by Mr. Gladstone, entitled "Vaticanism," in which the awful implications involved in the declaration of Infallibility were laid before the British public. How was it possible, Mr. Gladstone asked, with all the fulminating accompaniments of his most agitated rhetoric, to depend henceforward upon the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics? To this question the words of Cardinal Antonelli to the Austrian Ambassador might have seemed a sufficient reply. "There is a great difference," said his Eminence, "between theory and practice. No one will ever prevent the Church from proclaiming the great principles upon which its Divine fabric is based; but, as regards the application of those sacred laws, the Church, imitating the example of its Divine Founder, is inclined to take into consideration the natural weaknesses of mankind." And, in any case, it was hard to see how the system of Faith, which had enabled Pope Gregory XIII. to effect, by the hands of English Catholics, a whole series of attempts
