" Innocent betrayed his utter ignorance of theology when he declared that the Filth linok of Moses, being called Deuteronomy, or tlie Second Book of the Law, must bind the Christian Church, which is the second Church (Decretal ' Qui Jilii sint ler/iHmi' c. 13). This great pope seems never to have read Deuteronomy, or he could hardly have fallen into the blunder of suppos- ing, e. g., that the Old-Testament prohibitions of par- ticular kinds of food, the burnt-offerings, the harsh pe- nal code and liloody laws of war, the prohibitions of woollen and linen garments, etc., were to be again made obligatory on Christians. As the Jews were allowed in Deuteronomy to \n\t away a wife who disjileascd them and take anoriier, Innocent ran the risk of falling himself into a greater error about marriage than Celestine III.
Ndtalile conlradiclions as to temporal privileges occur in the history of tlie alternate apjirobations and perse- cutions of the Franciscan order by the popes.
"One of the most comprehensive, dogmatic docu- ments ever issued by a pope is the decree of luigenius IV 'to the Armenians,' dated November 22, 1439, three months alter the Council of F'lorence was brought to an end by the dejiarture of the Greeks. It is a confession of faith of the lioman Church, intended to serve as a rule of doctrine and practice for the Armenians on those points they had previously differed about. The dogmas of the Unity of the Divine Nature, the Trinity, the In- carnation, and the Seven Sacraments, are exnounded.
and the pope, moreover, asserts that the decree thus sol- emnly issued has received the sanction of the council, that is, of the Italian bishops whom he had detained in Florence.
" If this decree of the pope were really a rule of faith, the Eastern Church woidd have only four sacraments instead of seven ; the Western Church would for at least eight centuries have been deprived of three sacraments, and of one, the want of which would make all the rest, with one exception, invalid. Eugenius IV determines in this decree the form and matter, the substance of the sacraments, or of those things on the presence or ab- sence of which the existence of the sacrament itself de- pends, according to the universal doctrine of the Church. He gives a form of confirmation which never existed in one half of the Church, and first came into use in the other after the 10th centurj-. So, again, with penance. What is given as the essential form of the sacrament was unknown in the Western Church for eleven hun- dred years, and never known in the Greek. And when the touching of the sacred vessels, and the words accom- panying the rite, are given as the form and matter of ordination, it follows that the Latin Church for a thou- sand years had neither priests nor bishops — naj^, like the Greek Church, which never adopted this usage, pos- sesses to this hour neither priests nor bishops, and con- sequently no sacraments except baptism, and perhaps marriage. (Comp. Denzinger, Enchirul. Symbol, et Def- init., Wirceb. 1854, p. 200 sq. But Denzinger, in order to conct'al the jiurtly dogmatic character of this famous decree, //a.v iiiiiitt<<l tlie frst jiart, on the Trinily and In- carmitvm. wliicli is given in Eaynaldus's Annah, 1439. [The same conspicuously untenable explanation was adopted in the Dublin Review for January, 1866.— Tr.])
" It is noteworthy that this decree — with which pa- pal infallibility or the whole hierarchy and the sacra- ments of the Church stand or fall — is cited, refuted, and appealed to by all dogmatic writers, but that the adhe- rents of papal infallibility have never meddled with it. Neither BeUarmine, nor Charlas, nor Aguirre, nor Orsi, nor the other apologists of the Eoman court, troubled themselves with it.''
Into dogmatic theology the doctrine of papal infalli- bility was introduced by Thomas Aquinas. On the basis of fabrications invented by a Dominican monk, including a canon of the Council of t'halcedon, giving all bishops an unlimited right of appeal to the pope, and on the forgeries found in Gratian, Thomas built up his papal system, with its two leading principles, that the pope is the first infallible teacher of the world, and the absolute ruler of the Church. The popes were so well pleased with the teachings of Thomas that John XXII affirmed Thomas had not written without a special in- spiration of the Holy (ihost, and Innocent VI said that whoever assailed his teaching incurred suspicion of her- esy. The powerful mendicant orders of Dominicans and F'ranciscans found the papal system, with its theory of infallibility, indispensable for the success of their own claims against the bishops and universities, and they became the violent champinns of the new doctrine. The boldest champions of jiapal absolutism admitted, how- ever, that the popes could err, and that their decisions were no certain criterion. But they also held that in such cases a heretical pope ipso facto ceased to be pope, without or before any judicial sentence, so that councils, which are the Church's judicature, only attested the vacancy of the papal throne as an accomplished fact. The contest between the Council of Easel and pope Eu- genius IV evoked the work of cardinal Torqucmada, whose argument, which was held, up to the time of Bel- larmine, to be the most conclusive apology of the papal system, rests entirely on fabrications later than the pseudo-Isidore, and chiefly on the spurious passages of St. Cyril. Torquemada also holds that a j^ojie can lapse into heresy and propound false doctrine, but then he is ipso facto deposed by God himself before any sentence of the Church has been passed, so that the Church or