fact; and in this will be found one of the causes of the singular and luminous precision with which the Council of the Vatican has, in one brief Constitution, excluded the traditional errors on the Primacy and Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff.
The reasons which prevailed to bring about this change of method were not only those which demonstrated generally the opportuneness of defining the doctrine, but those also which showed specially the necessity of bringing on the question while as yet the Council was in the fulness of its numbers. It was obvious that the length of time consumed in the discussion, reformation, and voting of the schemata was such, that unless the Constitution De Romano Pontifice were brought on immediately after Easter, it could not be finished before the setting in of summer should compel the Bishops to disperse. Once dispersed, it was obvious they could never again reassemble in so large a number. Many who, with great earnestness, desired to share the blessing and the grace of extinguishing the most dangerous error which for two centuries has disturbed and divided the faithful, would have been compelled to go back to their distant sees and missions, never to return. It was obviously of the first moment that such a question should be discussed and decided, not, as we should have been told, in holes and corners, or by a handful of Bishops, or by a faction, or by a clique, but by the largest possible assembly of the Catholic Episcopate. All other questions, on which little divergence of opinion existed, might well be left to a smaller number of Bishops. But a doctrine which
