It is the universally prevalent feeling that all these detailed discussions and motions are mere preliminary skirmishes in which both parties practise themselves for the great contest and the decisive blow to be struck when the _Schema de Ecclesiâ_ comes on. The chief aim is to ascertain how far the minority can be induced to go, how much they will put up with, and what can be wrung from them by surprise or by quiet working on them individually. Public scenes, solemn protests before the whole world, are what the Legates want at any price to avoid. When the infallibilist dogma was to have been carried by sudden acclamation on St. Joseph's Day, four American Bishops handed in a paper declaring that, if this were done, they would immediately leave the Council and announce the reasons of their departure as soon as they got back to their dioceses. That took effect.
It is perhaps one of the most noteworthy and eventful changes in the policy of the Papal Court, that it now strains every nerve deliberately to exclude the laity from all share in Church affairs, and endeavours to hold them aloof in every case where formerly the Church not only allowed but desired and demanded their regular participation. Thirty years ago it was quite different, but since the darling scheme of the Jesuits for complete ecclesiastical absolutism and centralization in Rome, both intensive and extensive, has been adopted, the maxims first avowed by Pius in his instructions to Pluym, his delegate at Constantinople, have been acted upon. The Pope there affirms that the participation of the laity in Church matters has been the greatest injury to the Church. In Germany and north of the Alps generally, all who thought they knew anything of the spirit and history of the Church had believed just the contrary, and considered those to have been the most prosperous ages of the Church when there was a cordial understanding and unsuspicious co-operation between clergy and laity; and they pointed to the example of earlier Popes, who attributed a priesthood to Christian princes, and exhorted them to take the most active part in ecclesiastical affairs. But historical reminiscences are of no account here; we must be content to float on the stream of the present, without looking backwards or forwards, with the great multitude. "Fear nothing; I have the Madonna on my side," said the master the other day to a prelate who had warned him of the danger incurred by the present system. That word explains the enigma of our present situation.