this obstinacy and these illusions more than any belief of
party or principle are cloven by the lines of nationality. The Turkey's that England would, under certain conditions, send right of saying " Accedo ad —" possessed by each Cardinal up the Fleet to Constantinople. And so the matter rested when a voting has been gone through without result, disturbs a matter of course, the Russian Government deemed it right which emerges ultimately from the urn will be almost unknown a way which of all others concentrates attention on a Papal will be accepted in sincere reverence by millions, some of them possessing the most cultivated minds of earth, as the author- ised and infallible expositor of divine truth. No occurrence is more certain than the submission of the Catholic world to the next Pope, whoever he may be, and none can be conceived of more irreconcilable with human reason, except when used to compel itself to surrender its own claim to a presumably higher fiat. Wholly apart from the influence of the Pope on affairs, wholly apart from his unique position in Europe and the world—for this election will be felt in the Catholic Colleges in Pekin and in the depths of South America as keenly as in Paris—the mere fact that the greatest of Christian Churches should make one at all, that all that is most highly placed in a Church should come together to part, as it were, with their own authority, and bow in anticipation before an unknown colleague, is of itself a phenomenon which must and does stir the dullest. Here is the last grand representative of Authority, at work, making its mouth- piece,—it is impossible not to watch, impossible not to wish that it should make it freely, impossible not to dream of what the outcome under certain circumstances might be. This dreaminess in particular is greatly increased by the usual Protestant ignorance as to what a Pope can and cannot do. There is a notion abroad among thousands of Protestants, in which our Catholic friends would scarcely believe, that a Pope, especially since the promulgation of the Dogma, can do any- thing,—that a man might be elected who would revolutionise the Church, widen its dogmas, alter its formularies, change its " uses," till almost any Christian of any sort might be in- cluded in the Catholic Church. Some theory of this sort floats in the minds of all those who are eager for the reuniting of Christian Churches, and is by a few of them carried so far that they think a Pope, to take an extreme instance, could allow the Greek definition of the Godhead to be non-heretical. They do not realise the extent to which Infallibility is limited by the necessity it is under of declaring only that which has always been declared, " everywhere, always, and by all," and this failure of course greatly deepens their anxiety and their inquisitiveness. The religious possibilities loom to them larger even than they are, and they dream of a Catholic Broad Church or a Catholic Charitable Church with a kind of zeal in dreaming.
And finally, we suspect the Protestant and the sceptical worlds alike watch the election with an interest which is not entirely free from malice. They feel that the Papacy can be most seriously attacked from within, and cannot avoid, though they do not avow even to themselves, a hope at each election that the Cardinal elected may be a foolish or a feeble man, or one whose character will secure no reverence, or one who will strain his authority until even Catholics can endure it no longer, and will rather fall into the hands of God than into the hands of His Vicar on earth. A sort of expectation pre- vails, we believe, in many minds that the next Pope may be a man for whom Infallibility is too heavy a burden, or one whom the world will not believe to be infallible—there would be a difficulty, in spite of Councils, in believing it of Mr. Whalley —or one who would use his prerogative in some fashion against which men would revolt. There is not, of course, the slightest chance of any such expectation being realised. The Cardinals will never again elect a man of immoral life, even if they could find one in the Col- lege, and against foolishness the Church has protected itself by the crowd of theologians through whose minds any con- siderable utterance must be strained before it is effective or even audible in the external world. A Pope cannot decree a dogma, as Mr. Gladstone writes a letter, on a postcard. There might be a feeble Pope, but if there were, the first men who would master him would be the great ecclesiastics ; there might be a foolish Pope, but if there were, his foolishness would be filtered before mankind received his utterances ; and there might be a dogmatic Pope, but if there were, his orders would necessitate an investigation into previous orders on the same subject, which would occupy months, and allow time for all manner of representations. Half the liberty of Pio Nono, which was no doubt very great, was derived from the con- viction of those who stood around him that as Pope he could be better trusted than the entire College, and that the huge machinery in existence for enforcing care and consultation and deliberation was temporarily not required. Still Protestants who hear always of the Pope, and never, or scarcely ever, of those around him, cannot help thinking that the Cardinal selected might be a failure, or hoping a little that the Church in its supreme function might make some visible and perhaps irreparable blunder. What with ecclesias- tical interests, and intellectual admiration for the system, and human curiosity, and in some instances conscientious spiteful- ness, the Protestant world, even with a great war on hand, cannot forego its interest in the Papal Election, which, begin- ning next Wednesday, ought to be decided before our next issue appears. The story that the election will be a long one is like most of the stories as to the next Pope, a mere guess.
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