depended not on their own inherent weight, but on the consent of the Church.
Professor Schulte, for instance, declared that though a Catholic born and bred, he had never believed in Papal Infallibility; nor could he find any authority for the July Decree either in Scripture, or in the Fathers, or in any other source of historical information.
Fessler endeavoured to crush this resistance by labelling it private judgment. He says of Schulte that he "refuses to accept the definition de fide of an Ecumenical Council; he cares nothing for the authority of the living teaching Church; only for what he thinks he finds in Scripture, in the Fathers, and in other genuine ancient sources. This is the way to forsake the Catholic Church altogether. Every one is to follow his own guidance, his own private judgment."[1]
Expressed in such a form it seems a reductio ad absurdum. Surely the individual may be mistaken? And in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. Professor This on one side, the Episcopate on the other: can we doubt which to follow? Why then should not the professor make a sacrifice of his intellect? Because if you destroy a man's confidence in his historic judgment in one instance, you ruin its validity in all others. Now, since it is by such a judgment that Christianity itself is accepted, to bid a man disparage his own judgment of history, is to undermine the very basis of his religion.
Men found themselves, therefore, placed by the Decree in a very terrible dilemma. An ecumenical decision must be true. But history appears to refute it. To accept the decision is to contradict the fact of history. To accept history is to reject authority. That was the difficulty. But no man can without grievous loss abandon what appears to him the truth. Others
- ↑ Fessler, p. 24.
