om with
Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great
principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private
Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have
the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But
this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which
affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It
is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large
operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly
carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by
an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as
its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action
of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and
endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and
defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom
is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a
continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately
advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;--it is a vast
assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions,
brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman
Power,--into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school,
not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to
bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought
together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and
moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human
nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

St. Paul says in one place that his Apostolical power is given him to
edification, and not to destruction. There can be no better account of
the Infallibility of the Church. It is a supply for a need, and it does
not go beyond that need. Its object is, and its effect also, not to
enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious
speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance. What have been
its great works? All of them in the distinct province of theology:--to
put down Arianism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism, Manichaeism, Lutheranism,
Jansenism. Such is the broad result of its action in the past;--and now
as to the securities which are given us that so it ever will act in time
to c