Nothing further now remained but the great solemnity for promulging the Decree, and gathering the fruits of nearly eight months' toil. Only five days' delay was taken—days of intense excitement, and of incidents striking at the time, and important for all time. The minority saw how their hopes that the Pope would recoil before a vote so solemn as that recorded had been vain. The war-horse was prancing outside the door of the Council, and the fighting sons of Loyola could already tell what tidings he would bring. Louis Napoleon might have doubts, but the Fathers of the Civiltá had none. "Everything is always directed and turned by Providence for the good and the triumph of the Church." (VII. xi. 379). The crisis, they knew, would give the Vicar of God an opportunity of intervening, with his newly certified authority and infallibility, as mediator. This office once accepted would easily be turned to that of supreme judge. So would his new reign be grandly commenced. The Monde, of Paris, said to be the organ of the Nuncio, already called the war a religious war against Protestantism. France had been assured in every form that she had only to attack Prussia, and all the Catholics of Southern Germany would join her. Without the miscalculation at the Tuileries caused by these statements, it is not probable that the French would have been hurled into the ditch of Sedan. Both the precepts and the prophecies of the reconstructionists failed. The cry, "The Church," raised by the Bavarian priests was not so strong as that of "The Fatherland," raised by the patriots. This fact was still unknown at the Vatican. Though the inflation manifest before the Council was somewhat reduced, too much remained.
The prospect was not so bright to the bishops. They had not been always cooped up within the walls of Rome. Hints of how thoughts were turning reached them from home. They knew that men of study and of wisdom were either hostile to the new Constitution, or painfully solicitous. Some of the bishops had deep personal convictions, which experience during the Council had intensified; convictions that the whole proceeding was neither more nor less than the adoption of a false doctrine to sanction a fatal policy, and that the error was so fundamental as to involve the acceptance of a purely human fountain of doctrine for all time to come. They met and debated whether they should vote in the open session. Only twenty, according to Archbishop Scherr, were in favour of this course, and these did not insist on their own views, lest they should divide the eighty-eight.
On the evening of July 15, about eight o'clock, a deputation entered the Vatican, composed of the Primates of France and Hungary, with the Archbishops of Paris and Munich, and the Bishops of Mainz and Dijon. They had to wait an hour—a time doubtless filled up with meditations more ecclesiastical than those which sometimes occupy the moments lost in the ante-rooms of the Vatican; rooms full of traditional tales of the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and the sinful lusts of the flesh; such tales as good men, who had been forced to hear them, would not easily be forced to repeat.[453]
They were admitted about nine o'clock. They came from the minority to urge that the Pope should withdraw the additions made to the third canon of the third chapter, that canon the attempt to snatch an unconscious vote upon which had caused so profound an impression. They also wished the addition of a limiting clause to the definition of infallibility in the fourth chapter. Quirinus seems afraid to report the answer given by the Pope, and that for a reason which we suspect has often prevented English correspondents writing in Italy from telling true tales. They know that we judge of Popes and Cardinals by some such standard as that of our own public men, and that therefore to us the true tale would look like an invention. In the present case the answer was, "I shall do all I can, my dear sons; but I have not yet read the proposed Decree, and I do not know what it contains."[454] His Holiness requested to have the petition in writing. The spokesman, Darboy, replied, with French tact, that he would have it sent to His Holiness, and would take the liberty of forwarding at the same time the proposed Decree, which the Commission and the Presiding Cardinals had omitted to lay before his Holiness, though it wanted only two days of the public session, and thus had exposed him to the danger of promulging a Decree of which he was ignorant. Darboy not only did this, but also took care that others should know what the Pope had actually said. He wrote to the Committee on Faith, strongly censuring them for their neglect in not laying the proposed Decrees before the Pontiff!
It is curious to observe how all the Liberal Catholic writers who had come to Rome began by speaking of the Pope with the deference usual on this side of the Alps, but finally slipped into the habit of calling him "Pius." They evidently often had difficulty between their sense of the conventional respect due to a personage whom so many own as their head, and their feelings as honest men. The latter would have often prompted them to speak of Pius IX as Italians do, and not as Englishmen or Germans are wont to do.[455]
"Pius," continues Quirinus, added that if they would increase their eighty-eight votes to a hundred he would see what could be done. Only those who know the opinions entertained by that writer of the Pope's personal ignorance, and of his habit of speaking as if he knew everything, can appreciate the statement that his Holiness concluded by assuring the deputation that it was notorious that the whole Church had always taught the unconditional infallibility of the Popes.
Bishop Ketteler now threw himself on his knees before the Pontiff. For some time he remained in that position, entreating his sovereign to make some concession, and thus to restore peace and unity to the Church and to the Episcopate. This was the very scene to please one like Pius IX. And so the deputation left him with some hopes of concession—"full of the best hopes," said the Archbishop of Munich.[456]
Two men speedily sought to undo any impression that might have been made. Many a Roman Catholic has, in imagination, hovered over that scene, returning again and again to watch the figures of the agents of the Committee on Faith as they glided into the presence-chamber. Such Catholics in their imaginings have scowled at, ay, have cursed Senestrey the pupil of the Jesuit College Germanicum, and Manning the pupil of Oxford, as the instruments of the Jesuits going at this moment to harden the heart of the Pontiff, which some hoped had begun to relent. It is said that this remarkable pair urged that all was now ripe, that the majority were enthusiastic, and that moreover if the Pontiff made concessions he would be dishonoured in history as a second Honorius.[457] This "frightened the Pope," said Archbishop Von Scherr.
The hopes brought back by the deputation to the minority were speedily dispelled. In the course of the morning Cardinal Rauscher waited on his Holiness to thank him in the name of the minority for the gracious reception of their deputation. The shrewd Austrian pointed out to his royal master the effects which would flow from the definition as framed by the majority. "It is too late," said the Pope; "the formula is already distributed to the bishops and has been discussed. Besides, the public session is convened. It is now impossible to yield to the wishes of the minority."[458] On Friday night the Pope said that he had not seen the formula; on Saturday morning the Pope said that the formula was already distributed and discussed. And this formula was unchangeably to determine the fountain of doctrine, of ministerial authority, and of all power in a so-called Church. Friedrich, on writing down these words from the lips of his Archbishop, adds in a parenthesis, "One is ready to go crazed at the measureless frivolity with which the holiest questions are handled in Rome."