not alteration of the Faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individual as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; i.e., in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning."
Thus, according to Vincent, there may be all possible progress consistent with substantial identity. And the method by which the progress of the Church of the present day is safeguarded and controlled is perpetual reversion to the primitive type; any substantial deviation from which is a sign of variation from the truth.
The Romanist opponent of Papal Infallibility laid the greatest stress on St Vincent's principle, while the Ultramontane attempted a distinction between implicit and explicit truth. Grant that the Catholic faith must be contained in the original deposit of Revelation, must its recognition have been explicit from the first?[1] The Canon of St Vincent was asserted to be true in an affirmative sense, but not in a negative. Whatever satisfies the test of universality was undoubtedly part of the Catholic faith; but it did not follow that a doctrine which failed to fulfil this test was therefore uncatholic.
This distinction carried no conviction to a very large minority in the Roman Church, partly because the doctrine in question did not satisfy the test of universality, even in the nineteenth century, and partly because of the doctrine's intrinsic character. They failed to see how a doctrine which explicitly affirmed the Pope's independence of the Church's consent could be
- ↑ Franzelin. De Trad. p. 295.
