was not one of the objects professed in condemning the Council; and the Council is not yet ended."[1]
The moderate character of the Definition which Newman notes is indeed conspicuous, when compared with the extravagant statements of Manning and Ward, of Veuillot and the Univers.
An Infallibility, whose range is possibly limited to one solitary utterance in nineteen hundred years, is very different from the ideal of perpetual irreversible decisions of almost daily occurrence as described by Ward. Very different also from rapid termination of controversies which Manning considered so necessary to our progressive age. And there is reason to believe that the decision, although at first accepted by the Extremists with the wildest joy, was on maturer reflection viewed with considerable disappointment.
But this moderation has recently been viewed as a sign of truth. Certainly Manning would never have argued that it was. A via media between two extremes, upheld as ideal, would have been, indeed it was, Manning's detestation.
And if the Vatican Decree is moderate relatively to a school of extravagance, it is no less stupendous relatively to a school of antiquity. Judged by the conceptions of St Vincent of Lerins the dogma is not moderate, it is most extreme. If some who anticipated and feared something much more pronounced acquiesced in the actual dogma with comparative relief, a very different estimate will be formed by those whose standard of moderation is the doctrine of antiquity.
If the total advantage hitherto reaped from Papal Infallibility be compared with that which the Church has gained from its Ecumenical Councils, the balance
- ↑ Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 154.
