But now just the contrary is to take place. The decisive contest on that point--if it comes to an open contest--will not be fought on the third _Schema_, _On __ the Church and the Pope_, but at once on the first _Schema_, the handiwork of the Jesuits, when it is returned to the Council, professedly modified but in substance unchanged, from the Commission of two Jesuits and three Infallibilists. As we hear, no attention has been paid to the counter representations of the Bishops, some of whom have objected to it altogether as superfluous and mischievous, some as erroneous and exaggerated. It will now without further discussion, which is simply impossible in the Council Hall, be accepted by the mere majority of votes of the compact troop of Infallibilists, who are at the Pope's command as _valets à tout faire_, and proclaimed as a dogma by Pius, _approbante Concilio_, as the form runs. Thereby, according to approved Roman doctrine, has the Holy Ghost spoken by the mouth of His divine representative, "causa finita est;" and it only remains for the 150 or 200 opposing Bishops to make all haste to perform a great mental evolution, to change their laws of thought, to reverence as revealed truth what they have hitherto rejected as error, and to force the clergy and laity under them by excommunication and suspension to perform the same gymnastic feat of leaping at one jump from unbelief into firm and immoveable faith.
The modern and purely mechanical scholasticism has brought matters to such a pass that many seriously look upon the Council as a machine, which only needs turning to get new dogmas carried and authorized by the Holy Ghost. Formerly, theologians used to say that the voice of a General Council is nothing but the voice of the whole Church concentrated in one place; that every Bishop bears witness to the traditional belief of his Church and of his predecessors; and that the harmony of these testimonies proves what is the universal belief, and thus attests the truth and purity of the profession of faith sanctioned by the Council. But now all this is entirely changed. The Bishops have come, without any previous knowledge as to what they were to vote about; long-winded and ready-made documents are laid before them on questions most of them have never examined in their lives, of which their flocks at home know nothing and have never heard; they are expected to pass decrees the necessity and opportuneness of which appear to them highly problematical, and to pronounce a string of anathemas, because the Pope and Jesuits will it. They are cooped up in a treadmill called a Council, and must willingly or unwillingly grind what is thrown into it. It cannot indeed be exactly said that this procedure is new and unprecedented, for the same thing occurred, on a much smaller scale, at the Fifth Lateran Council under Julius II. and Leo. X.; but then only the Italian Bishops were made use of, who had long been broken in to the _rôle_ of flunkeys. Now, on the contrary, the Bishops of all nations have been brought into prison at Rome, and are to say Yea and Amen to the decrees the _Curia_ and the Jesuits have drawn up and mean to make obligatory.