succession vitiated. On the other hand, if John was wrong--well,
he was a heretic; and the same inconvenient results followed.
And, in either case, what becomes of Papal Infallibility?

But such crude and fundamental questions as these were not likely
to trouble the Council. The discordant minority took another
line. Infallibility they admitted readily enough, the
infallibility, that is to say, of the Church; what they shrank
from was the pronouncement that this infallibility was
concentrated in the Bishop of Rome. They would not actually deny
that, as a matter of fact, it was so concentrated; but to declare
that it was, to make the belief that it was an article of faith--
what could be more-- it was their favourite expression-- more
inopportune? In truth, the Gallican spirit still lingered among
them. At heart, they hated the autocracy of Rome-- the domination
of the centralised Italian organisation over the whole vast body
of the Church. They secretly hankered, even at this late hour,
after some form of constitutional government, and they knew that
the last faint vestige of such a dream would vanish utterly
with the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope. It did not
occur to them, apparently, that a constitutional Catholicism
might be a contradiction in terms, and that the Catholic Church,
without the absolute dominion of the Pope, might resemble the
play
of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

Pius IX himself was troubled by doubts. 'Before I was Pope,'
he observed, 'I believed in Papal Infallibility, now I feel it.'
As for Manning, his certainty was no less complete than his
master's. Apart from the Holy Ghost, his appointment to the See