the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a positive act
of contiguous date, and of which the souvenir is vivid: he has not
recognized them - he has made them; he has given them their external
form and their internal structure; no one of them can look within
itself without finding in its laws the fresh imprint of the sovereign
hand which has fashioned it; none of them can assert or even believe
itself legitimate without declaring the superior authority to be
legitimate which has just endowed it with life and being. The last
step, the greatest of all, above the terrestrial and practical order
of things, in speculative theology, in the revelation of the
supernatural, in the definition of things that are divine: the Pope,
the better to prove his autocracy, in 1854, decrees, solely, of his
own accord, a new dogma, the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and
he is careful to note that he does it without the concurrence of the
bishops; they were on hand, but they neither deliberated nor
decided.[10]

Thus arise durable powers, spiritual or temporal, little by little,
through the uninterrupted and uncontested series of their acts; from
1791 to 1870 all ecclesiastical precedents, one added to another,
became consolidated, one through the other and through their mass;
story after story, steadily ascending and converging to raise the Pope
higher still, until at last, on the summit of the edifice, the Holy
See becomes the keystone of the arch, the omnipotence of fact being
completed by omnipotence of right.

Meanwhile Catholic opinion came to the aid of pontifical opinion, and,
in France, the clergy spontaneously became ultramontane because there
was no longer any motive for remaining Gallican. Since the Revolution,
the Concordat and the Organic Articles, all the sources which