ove, a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to
encounter and master a giant evil.

And now, having thus described it, I profess my own absolute submission
to its claim. I believe the whole revealed dogma as taught by the
Apostles, as committed by the Apostles to the Church; and as declared by
the Church to me. I receive it, as it is infallibly interpreted by the
authority to whom it is thus committed, and (implicitly) as it shall be,
in like manner, further interpreted by that same authority till the end
of time. I submit, moreover, to the universally received traditions of
the Church, in which lies the matter of those new dogmatic definitions
which are from time to time made, and which in all times are the
clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined.
And I submit myself to those other decisions of the Holy See,
theological or not, through the organs which it has itself appointed,
which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground
come to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed. Also, I consider
that, gradually and in the course of ages, Catholic inquiry has taken
certain definite shapes, and has thrown itself into the form of a
science, with a method and a phraseology of its own, under the
intellectual handling of great minds, such as St. Athanasius, St.
Augustine, and St. Thomas; and I feel no temptation at all to break in
pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us for these latter
days.

All this being considered as the profession which I make _ex animo_, as
for myself, so also on the part of the Catholic body, as far as I know
it, it will at first sight be said that the restless intellect of our
common humanity is utterly weighed down, to the repression of all
independent effort and action whatever, so that, if this is to be the
mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be
destroyed. But this is far from the result, far from what I conceive to
be the intention of that high Providence who has provided a great remedy
for a great evil,--far from borne out by the history of the conflict
between Infallibility and Reason in the past, and the prospect of it in
the future. The energy of the human intellect "does from opposition
grow;" it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under
the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so
much itself as when it has lately been overthrown. It is the cust