to the Council of Trent: Let nothing be defined without unanimous consent. Dupanloup remembers well that when he was in Rome, in 1867, Pius IX., in discussing the projected Council, was most solicitous that subjects which might divide the Episcopate should not be brought before it. And in a recent reply to some English ministers as to terms of reunion, the Pope had spoken of papal supremacy, but not a word of Infallibility. If certain journalists still proclaim this theory and expect to intimidate the Bishops into silence, Dupanloup's reply is, They neither know Pius IX. nor the Episcopate.
Dupanloup's transparent sincerity none will doubt. But in face of the facts at our disposal, it is singular that he was so little able to read the signs of the times, or to estimate the forces at the disposal of the Infallibilist party. It is clear that he proposed to go to Rome totally ignorant of the issues before him, frankly disbelieving that Infallibility would come within conciliar discussion. It is clear that whatever service he had rendered to the papal cause, he was not in the confidence of Pius IX. But that this doctrine was the deliberate aim for which the Council was gathered is probably now a settled conviction with serious students of history. It is simply incredible that so far-sighted a Curia as that of Rome was suddenly led by impulse to the formulation of a dogma most momentous yet quite unforeseen.
If Dupanloup pronounced the dogma of Papal Infallibility most inopportune, it was partly because he understood sympathetically the conditions of religious life outside the Roman Communion, and knew that nothing in the world could be less calculated to win. He wrote most forcibly on the futility of inviting, as the Pope had done, the Oriental Bishops of the separated
