It is said that secrecy has been again imposed upon
the Bishops by the Pope,—rather superfluously, we should say, for the amount of leakage from the Council is marvellously small,—and that they have been begged to be shorter in their speeches,—a request which, considering that there are near 800 of them, and that the Council must last for at least a quarter of a century if they are all to speak as fully in proportion as the much smaller number of their predecessors at Treut spoke,—does not seem to us so unreasonable as the somewhat captious critics of our Protestant Press appear to suppose. (heat allowance must be made for writers who evidently find pumping bishops under an oath of secrecy a rather uuremunerative task, and who are a little disposed to strike the rock from which the stream refuses to gush. But surely it is a little unreasonable to parade the ability and out- spokenness of the recalcitrant bishops ou the one baud, and the terrible rigour of the Papal tyranny which forbids such outspoken- ness on the other. By all we can hear, we should gather that the oppositiou in the Council is not only frauk and able, but tolerably unfettered.
Previous page
