uently, the Council of
Basel states that it is legitimately assembled in the Holy Ghost, and
that no one, not even the pope, can dissolve, transfer, nor prolong it,
without the consent of the fathers of the council."

The other articles may be reduced principally to the following
propositions: Canonical elections shall be held, and the pope shall not
reserve the bishoprics and other elective benefices. Expectant pardons
shall be abolished. Graduates shall be preferred to others in the
conferring of benefices, and for this reason they shall suggest their
degrees during Lent. All ecclesiastical causes of the provinces at a
distance of four days' journey from Rome shall be tried in the place
where they arise, except major causes and those of churches which are
immediately dependent on the holy see. In the case of appeals, the order
of the tribunals shall be preserved. No one shall ever appeal to the
pope without passing previously through the intermediate tribunal. If
anyone, believing himself injured by an intermediate tribunal subject to
the pope, makes an appeal to the holy see, the pope shall name the
judges from the same places, unless there should be important reasons
for bringing the cause directly to Rome. Frivolous appeals are punished.
The celebration of divine service is regulated and spectacles in
churches are forbidden. The abuse of ecclesiastical censures is
repressed, and it is declared that no one is obliged to shun
excommunicated persons, unless they have been proclaimed by name, or
else that the censure shall be so notorious that it cannot be denied or
excused. Such are the principal matters of the Pragmatic Sanction of
Bourges. It was registered at the Parliament of Paris, July 13, 1439;
but the King ordered its execution from the day of its date, 1438.

The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had a little defect; it was radically
null; for every contract is null which is not consented to by both of
the contracting parties. Now the Pragmatic Sanction was a contract
between the churches of France and the pope to regulate their mutual
relations. The consent of the pope to it was therefore absolutely
necessary, the more especially as he was the superior. For if one must
admit that a general council is superior to the pope, the Assembly of
Bourges was certainly not a general council. Moreover, the first use
that it made of its Pragmatic Sanction was to break it--and happily. In
its first articles, it had recogniz