ome.

First, Infallibility cannot act outside of a definite circle of thought,
and it must in all its decisions, or _definitions_, as they are called,
profess to be keeping within it. The great truths of the moral law, of
natural religion, and of Apostolical faith, are both its boundary and
its foundation. It must not go beyond them, and it must ever appeal to
them. Both its subject-matter, and its articles in that subject-matter,
are fixed. And it must ever profess to be guided by Scripture and by
tradition. It must refer to the particular Apostolic truth which it is
enforcing, or (what is called) _defining_. Nothing, then, can be
presented to me, in time to come, as part of the faith, but what I ought
already to have received, and hitherto have been kept from receiving,
(if so,) merely because it has not been brought home to me. Nothing can
be imposed upon me different in kind from what I hold already,--much
less contrary to it. The new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be
called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed
relatively to the old truth. It must be what I may even have guessed, or
wished, to be included in the Apostolic revelation; and at least it will
be of such a character, that my thoughts readily concur in it or
coalesce with it, as soon as I hear it. Perhaps I and others actually
have always believed it, and the only question which is now decided in
my behalf, is, that I have henceforth the satisfaction of having to
believe, that I have only been holding all along what the Apostles held
before me.

Let me take the doctrine which Protestants consider our greatest
difficulty, that of the Immaculate Conception. Here I entreat the reader
to recollect my main drift, which is this. I have no difficulty in
receiving the doctrine; and that, because it so intimately harmonizes
with that circle of recognized dogmatic truths, into which it has been
recently received;--but if _I_ have no difficulty, why may not another
have no difficulty also? why may not a hundred? a thousand? Now I am
sure that Catholics in general have not any intellectual difficulty at
all on the subject of the Immaculate Conception; and that there is no
reason why they should. Priests have no difficulty. You tell me that
they _ought_ to have a difficulty;--but they have not. Be large-minded
enough to believe, that men may reason and feel very differently from
yourselves; how is it that men, when left to themselves,