receive its dogmatic Decrees. This is a point of history and precedent, and, of course, on further examination I may find myself wrong in the view which I take of history and precedent; but I do not, cannot see, that a majority in the present Council can of itself rule its own sufficiency without such external testimony.
"But there are other means by which I can be brought under the obligation of receiving a doctrine as a dogma."
And he proceeds to enumerate uninterrupted tradition, Scripture inference, etc. And then he propounds the theory that "the fact of a legitimate Superior having defined it, may be an obligation in conscience to receive it with an internal assent. … In this case I do not receive it on the word of the Council, but on the Pope's self-assertion."
This he supports by an appeal to the historic authority which the Pope has actually exercised, and to
"the consideration that our merciful Lord would not care so little for His elect people, the multitude of the faithful, as to allow their visible Head and such a large number of Bishops to lead them into error; and an error so serious, if an error."
No one can fail to be impressed with Newman's painful consciousness of the Council's indefensible irregularities; with his refusal to acknowledge a powerful majority as equivalent to moral unanimity; with his desire to see if the dogma cannot be accepted on other grounds than the Council's authority, and in particular on the Pope's self-assertion. All this would, of course, be absolutely unconvincing to any adherent of the ancient conception that the supreme authority is not to be found in the Pope's self-assertion, but in the Collective Episcopate. But it manifests profound misgivings about the Vatican Council and its methods.
