Church and the See of Peter. This protestation, which we ask to be inscribed in the records of the Church, we likewise confidently proffer in the name of our absent brethren, whether detained at home by force, where to-day they weep and pray, or whether by reason of urgent affairs or sickness they cannot to-day be present with us.'
Two years and a half, therefore, before the Council of the Vatican assembled, the Bishops had given their spontaneous adhesion to the doctrines of the Syllabus, and to the Papal documents from which they were extracted. This is a proof added to hundreds given us in history that the Popes do not pronounce on the doctrines or affairs of the Universal Church except in the sense of the Universal Church. This chain of facts should be kept in mind by every one who would form a right appreciation of Mr. Gladstone's Expostulation. Another fact to be kept in mind is this, that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was not defined in 1854, until petitions for it had been long pouring into Rome from every part of the Church, until every Bishop of the Church had been called upon to give the tradition of his See, the sense of his clergy and people, and his own view of the subject, and until the whole tradition of the Church from the Apostles had been investigated. The schismatic Greeks raised a complaint that the Pope should now first proclaim a doctrine that the East had always believed in. So far was this definition from being 'the deadly blow of 1854,' to use Mr. Gladstone's words, 'at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school.'[1] What 'bearing on civil allegiance'
