“Cease your barking, hounds!” they shouted,
As with Satan’s mouth undoubted.
Then they rushed, those wicked brothers,
Roughly through the holy door;
But, as though at final judgment,
Down they heard that chorus pour.
FOOTNOTES
[1]Of course the champions of papal infallibility are at great pains to deny this. But all the contemporary writers, such as Athanasius, Hilary, and Jerome, assert it, and against it there is nothing but a priori assumptions and the assertion that the third Sirmian formula signed by Liberius has been mistaken for the first, which was Arian. In Dr. Newman’s Arians of the Fourth Century, pp. 433-40, there is a careful account of the three Sirmian formulas. The main fact never was denied until the necessities of the infallibility theory compelled the rewriting of history. Even the old Roman Breviary declares that “Liberius assented to the Arian mischief.”
[2]See Dr. Dollinger’s Fables respecting the Popes in the Middle Ages (New York, 1872), pp. 183-209. In 1582 Gregory XIII. was on the point of expunging his name from the Roman Martyrology, as Baronius had proven that he was neither a pope nor a martyr, but had died peaceably on his own estate near Rome. But the discovery of a stone with an inscription asserting his martyrdom turned the scale the other way. Modern scholarship stigmatizes the inscription as a fraud, and it is notable that the stone has disappeared.
[3]Condensed from Ancient Rome in the Light of Modern Discoveries, by Professor Rodolfo Lanciani. Boston, 1888.