Nor is it possible, argued Döllinger, to account for the transference of infallible authority from the Church to the Pope, as a process of legitimate development. The new theory is the negation of the old. The ancient doctrine was that the Divine guidance is given to the Church collectively. It is the Church, as a whole, which cannot fall away. But the Ultramontane theory reverses this. It asserts that Divine guidance is given not to the Church collectively, but to one individual person; that Infallibility is his alone—a prerogative in which the Collective Episcopate has no share; that from him alone the Church receives light and truth. This is not development. It is negation. Among the Scripture passages to which Infallibilists chiefly appealed was the exhortation to strengthen his brethren. But this is an exhortation, not a promise. "It is a violent perversion to turn an admonition to duty into a promise of the invariable fulfilment of that duty." Still less can this exhortation be transferred as a promise to his successors, when it was only a personal admonition. It was, moreover, an exhortation which Peter himself did not invariably fulfil. Far from strengthening the Church at Antioch in the faith, he rather perplexed it by his dissimulation.
Döllinger contended that the historical growth of belief in the theory of Papal Infallibility was sufficiently instructive. When proposed to the Council of Trent, it was withdrawn by the legates who proposed it; because they recognised that a number of the Bishops disapproved it. Since that time the influence of the Jesuits and the Inquisition had steadily extended the theory, for they made the presentation of any other doctrine in books or teaching impossible in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Every attempt to test the theory by historical criticism had been put upon the Index and suppressed, with the solitary exception of Bossuet and Cardinal de la Luzerne.
