ran—I have strengthened thee, do thou in thy turn strengthen thy brethren. Or else it might mean—so it was suggested—Having turned your attention to them, exercise your Infallibility. But even if the sentence, "when thou art converted," bore no allusion to Peter's denial, still no possible exegesis can justly elicit the Infallibility of his successors out of the injunction "strengthen thy brethren." Peter's successors would be thereby ordered to bestow moral support upon their weaker brethren. But whether they would obey this command and fulfil it with more invariable exactitude than he to whom it was spoken, is a question of historical investigation and not of à priori theory.
The preceding exposition has been very largely derived from Roman Catholic sources; from the writings of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, opposing, in behalf of the Church of France, the Ultramontanism of the seventeenth century; of Barral, Archbishop of Tours, in the early nineteenth century; of Bishop Maret, and of Gratry, just before the Vatican Council of 1870; of Döllinger, prior to the rupture with Rome; of Archbishop Kenrick of St Louis, in the speech which he intended to deliver in the Vatican Council, in exercise of his divine right as a Bishop, but whose delivery was prevented by the closure of the discussion.
