simply as a polity, and professes to apply the same principles to it which belong to other polities; and, wholly omitting its prophetical office of teaching truth, makes it impose its dogmas on us on the same principle on which the State imposes Acts of Parliament."[1]
This contribution to Ultramontanism received a criticism, also from the Roman Bishop Maret, just on the eve of the Vatican Council.
"These weaknesses," says Maret, "of an able mind may remind us that the true seat of sovereignty and infallibility in the Church is not to be reached by logic but by appeal to Scripture and Tradition. Joseph de Maistre has not recognised this necessity. If he had not been a partisan dominated by a pre-conceived theory based on insecure foundations, he would have realised that a writer's first duty was to make a careful study of the General Councils, if he would understand the Church's constitution. And this he has most inadequately done."[2]
Here then, said a contemporary French critic,[3] we have the doctrine of infallible authority humanised and rationalised. But the contradiction is too gross to permit this solution of the problem to be taken literally. The tour de force is too puerile. We decline to believe that De Maistre was altogether duped by it. It is impossible that he could not have seen the huge abyss which separates Infallibility, as the Church understands it, from civil sovereignty and final judicial appeal. The former not only demands submission, but assent, belief. The second only imposes respect and exterior obedience, without involving any interior conviction
