IV.
Papal Infallibility and the Syllabus.
The Catholic Church has ever taught that the deposit of revealed truths received its completion on the day of Pentecost, and that from that hour it can receive neither increase nor diminution. It may be gradually unfolded, as Vincentius of Lerins hath it; the bloom of youth may grow into the vigour of manhood, but the body is one and the same. It may be clothed with the venerable garb of antiquity, may strike deeper and wider roots into the consciousness of mankind, but can lose naught of its fulness, can admit no stain on its youthful purity. The pearls of the heavenly doctrine may receive lustre and grace, borrowed from on high, and may be set in gold or silver. Above all, they may acquire distinctness. The several parts of a fertile and complex principle may, one after another, be brought before the eyes of the faithful. That Mary was at every moment of her existence a spotless work of God's hands, was revealed from the beginning; during these later ages the attention of the faithful has been especially called to the first moment of that existence—the moment of her Immaculate Conception. Nothing new has been revealed, but what was implicitly believed has been in our own times explicitly defined.
Now, it is the belief of Catholics, that those to whose keeping the unalterable deposit was entrusted, were not intended to be mere keepers of the dead letter of revealed doctrine. Their task is, in the language of the early Fathers, to have a care lest any cunning flight of the human intellect should strive to adapt the dogmas of faith to its own shifting and wayward fancies. God gave us His teachers, as St. Paul writeth to the Ephesians, that we may not be swayed by every wind of doctrine.
Hence the Church, in our belief, may pass sentence on such philosophical principles, on such opinions of human science, as imperil the purity of dogma; and can exact intellectual submission to such pronouncements. She may, moreover, pronounce that error is contained in such or such writings, when ever it becomes necessary for the fulfilment of Christ's precept of keeping His sheep from poisoned pastures. But in passing these sentences she is not defining articles of faith; for assuredly it was not revealed to the Apostles that such heretics as Arius or Abelard, or Luther, or Jansenius, or Döllinger and his followers, were ever to be born, or that such or such a book was ever to be penned. Here we have one class of what are called dogmatic facts, that is, natural truths, not forming part of the revealed deposit, yet claimed by the Church as a partial object of her infallibility.
I think this will be allowed to be consistent; history shews that for the last eighteen hundred years the Church has sternly and unflinchingly acted on this principle. Dogmatic facts not contained in the deposit were defined, and obedience to the definition was enforced from the time when Arius was condemned by the Fathers down to our own day; but it would be beyond my scope to enter on ground so ably trodden by others. The intellectual assent required by the Church to a non-revealed proposition is not, of course, an act of divine faith.
It is not my task to defend the Syllabus against non-Catholics on the ground of Papal Infallibility. I have only aimed in this article at clearing up a popular prejudice. I now ask for a patient hearing, whilst, as simply and briefly as I am able, I shall pass in review the much-maligned series of condemnations. Some of the errors condemned are heresies; many rest on atheistical principles; while some are historical falsehoods, coined for the purpose of leading the faithful away from the guidance of the Church of Christ. I now pass to consider, one by one, the errors condemned in the Syllabus, prefixing a few remarks to each section.