It is hardly necessary to observe to your readers that everything which takes place here turns on the question of Infallibility. The new order of business is merely the outer covering for this kernel. "With Infallibility we have all we desire or need," say the Italians, if that is gained we may "let the nigger go," and can dispense with his services for the future. But for German theologians, whose hair stands on end at the new order of business and all it involves, I can find no other consolation than what they may derive from the following Persian tale. An English ambassador sent to Persia--I think it was Morier--paid the usual visits at Teheran, and was introduced to the younger son of the Shah. He found him groping about blindfold in the room, and feeling for the furniture in it. The Prince explained this strange business by telling him that it was the rule for the younger sons to be blinded at the death of the Shah, in order to make them incapable of succeeding, and that he wished to prepare and practise himself beforehand for the fate impending over him. "Go ye, and do likewise."
If the German theologians should still have courage to present an address to their Bishops, the subscription might be, "Morituri vos salutant." Why have these theologians come to such utter discomfiture?
Here one already hears shouts of triumph; the day of retribution will soon come for those proud Transalpines, when they must bend their necks under the Caudine yoke of the new dogma, or await suspension, degradation, etc.
If German theology had long been decried and hated by the _Curia_ and the Italian Jesuits, and if the _Civiltà_ gladly took occasion to pour out its wrath on the scholars of "foggy" Germany, you may conceive the extent this fury has reached in Italian clerical papers and curialist circles, since it has become known that the most influential theologians have pronounced against Infallibility, and that not one--with the exception of a couple of pupils of the Jesuits--has said a word to defend it. It is well that one of the most distinguished Italians, a man whose devotion to the Church is unimpeached even in Rome, and whom the Pope has commissioned to write a history of the Council--I mean Cantù--has some years ago confessed and censured this characteristic of his countrymen. "To call laziness superiority, and evade the trouble of examining questions by depreciating them, this is only too much the habit of Italians, and then they mock at the ponderous, long-winded, hair-splitting Germans. But we must endure the reproach of negligence and thoughtlessness from the Germans, while we blindly accept falsified documents."(57)