supreme pastor. It is my right to govern all. I am supreme judge. I may judge all and be myself judged by no one whomsoever. I am the echo of heaven, the infallible voice of God.[1]
Shall the harmony of the Church Catholic be destroyed because the Papacy has availed itself of outward circumstances to extend its usurped domination over a certain number of individual churches? Assuredly not. So far from excluding from this concord churches which have resisted her usurpations, it is the Papacy itself that is to be thus excluded. Not only has she broken with churches truly Catholic, but she has violated the traditions of her own Church. She has divided them into two distinct parts, like the Roman episcopate itself. The Roman traditions of the first eight centuries are not the same as those of succeeding ages. The Papacy has, therefore, lost its true perpetuity in the very points wherein it has innovated. Thus a member of the Roman Church who returns to the primitive doctrine of that Church, who rejects the innovations of the Papacy, reënters at once into the Catholic concord, belongs to the true Church of Jesus Christ, to that Church which has maintained itself in its double character of perpetuity, of universality. Far from us be those deplorable accusations of schism hurled at venerable churches, which have preserved the revealed doctrine in its primitive purity, which have preserved the apostolic ministry! The Papacy calls them schismati-
- ↑ To similar words, almost the same as those summed up by the author, the present pontiff, Pius IX., lately presumed to add the awful expression, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." — Editor.
