The Sun.
London, England, 1868-07-27 00:00:00

THE (ECUMENICAL COUACIL.

(From tie Church News.)

After an interval of more than three hundred
years the Bishop of Rome has once more issued a
Bull convoking an " (Ecumenical and General
Council." Its assembling will mark an era not less
momentous than that of the Council of Trent, and
the results to be expected will be equally marke I and
grave. Three hundred years ago the greatest op-
ponents of the See of Rome professed great reverence
and much arxiety for a true (Ecumenical Synod.
It was so in Germany, it was so in England. Now,
however, the whole current of society runs in another
direction. The world has ceased to care for the
authority of the Church, and can quietly criticise,
without any feeling of personal interest or con-
cern, the antiquated and stately solemnity of the
document which has just issued from the Vati-
can. Or if, as may be the else, it recognises in
it the muster-call of a vast and powerful army,
summoned to take an active part in the contro-
versies of the day and the questions which ar.3
working most energetically in the minds of modern
thinkers, the world at large regards it as a hostile
army to be encountered and crushed without cere-
mony and without mercy.
At the time of the Council of Trent the Church
and the world were in very different relative posi-
tions from those which they now occupy ; and even
those States and nations most in antagonism to the
Church were among the foremost in allying them-
selves with religious principles and with religious
organizations. It is changing now. In every di-
rection is the authority of the State disengaging it-
self, not only from the Church, but from religion ;
and the influence of religion, which in many coun-
tries is at present one with that of the Church of
Rome, is gradually dwindling away, even in those
countries—as Austria, taly, and Spain—where but
a few years ago it might have been supposed im-
movable. We cannot' wonder, that, as the .aged
Pontiff reviewed in turn from the Vatican the
countries of the Christian world, he should
have epitomised the results of his survey in
the gloomy and bitter censures contained i❑ his
Bull. A horrible tempest, he truly declares, agi-
tates the Church, and at the same time all the foun-
dations of the earth are out of course.

It is very natural, under such circumstances,
ecclesiastical and civil, to turn to the idea of a Ge-
neral Council as the right remedy for our ills, so
far as they may be healed by the Church. Perhaps
our times are not in themselves worse than many
that have preceded them, but they are the begin-
ning of a new state of society, which promises to be
more desperately ungodly than any generation the
world has yet seen. It is in itself a remarkable sign
of the times thst the solemn reassembling of the
Universal Episcopate in General Council should at
this particular juncture be thought essential to the
welfare of the Church. It is a proof that the in-
stinct of the Church is leading her to fall back on
her great stronghold reserved for times of excep-
tional necessity and peril. And when we say " the
Church," we do not mean the Roman Communion
only. We all know how the same feeling of the
necessity for united action has been growing and
variously manifesting itself outside that Com-
munion, and how the longing for the time
when the whole Church may again really unite in
one truly (Ecumenical Synod has been gathering
strength year by year. The Papal Bull is but the
strongest evidence that the feeling is not confined
to those who are outside, but is shared in by the
heads of the Roman Communion itself. Of course
a really (Ecumenical Council is at present impos-
sible ; the very terms of the Pontifical summons
exclude the possibility ; but they show that Rome
believes it to be needed, as we also believe ; and
when the whole Church shall unite in desiring and
praying for it, then we trust it will be time for it
to come.

Partial, however, as the Council must be, partial
in extent, partial in authority, its influence for good
or for evil must be enormous. Critical questions
for the Church and the World will have to be dis-
cussed, and in one way or other decided. The Bull
gives sufficiently clear indications that many ques-
tions closely bearing on modern politics will be
brought under review. The result can scarcely be
doubted. It is not at such times as this, when the
spiritual power and influence of the See of Rome
are most strongly manifested, that that See will
be most disposed to conciliate the powers of the
World, or to abate aught of its own lofty preten-
sions. In the meantime the wheels of political
society will have rolled on in their present grooves
for eighteen 'months longer, and the divergence of
wordly policy from spiritual contest will have
become still more rrarked. Dogmatism on one
side will evoke more decided counter-dogmatism on
the other, and a vast impetus will be given to the
almost universal tendency wholly to separate poli-
tics from religion. As M. 011ivier said in his
weighty and significant speech, the convocation of
this Council is " the gravest act which has been ac-
complished since 1789. It is separation of Church
and State proclaimed for the first time by the Pope
himself."

Doubtless it was the conviction of the growing
hostility of secular powers to the Church and reli-
gion which caused the exclusion of all reference to
them iu the Papal Bull. The Pope must have felt
that their interests were not his, and he could
not call them to council as friends. His omission
of invitation to secular princes may have been, and
probably was, a tacit admission of this truth ; a
mutual recognition of the virtual separation be-
tween the Church and the world which is growing
more decided day by day, and which the result of
the Council will in all probability precipitate.
There is much that is striking in the unflinching
firmness with which the Roman Pontiff, fully con-
scious as he must be that he is but increasing his
temporal troubles, summons his spiritual authority
to the conflict with the growing ungodliness of the
age. To a very great extent his cause is that of
the whole Church, and his enemies are ours and
those of the whole Christian society. Hitherto it
has been urged as a reproach against the Roman
communion that it has done comparatively little in
the war against modern infidelity. We hope this
reproach is now about to be wiped away, for it cer-
tainly can no longer be pretended with any decent
plausibility that the contest is one wholly ex-
ternal to herself, a mere exhibition of Protestantism
bearing its own fruit.
But if the Church of Rome is preparing for a more
formal separation from secular powers we wish we
could hope she would seek corirpensation in drawing
nearer to other branches of the Church. God may bring
it about, but it is what we cannot possibly anticipate
in the ordinary course of things. Nothing is said
in the Bull about the infallibility of the Bishop of
Rome, but there are grave suspicions, and fully
justified by the course of modern Roman policy,
that this monstrous dogma may be raised into an
article of the Roman Catholic faith. It is indeed
difficult to see how it should be otherwise if the
traditional course of proceeding be followed. It has
been permitted, encouraged, taught publicly, main-
tained controversially, all without rebuke, just as
in the case of the dogma of the immaculate concep-
tion, and now nothing seems wanting but to put
the seal of authority ou that which has been so long
quasi-authoritatively upheld. To say that it would
be a most disastrous and suicidal step is nothing.
Rome has so far committed herself that she will
find it infinitely bard to pause or to turn back,
and we can only hope that she may be withheld
even against her own will, from an act which would
stereotype her claims as falsehood and her Position
in the face of Christendom as irremediably schis-
matical. Rome cannot alter facts : and so long as
history rernaina history, and facts retain any de-
finite meaning whatever, no decrees of so-called
CErmmenical Councils can make the Bishop of
Rome's infallibility anything better than a fiction
and an absurdity. It would be something far be-
yond a blunder to raise Such a dogma into an
article of faith, while it would be a blunder of the
most formidable kind for R9lllO at one and the
same time to throw down the gauntlet of defiance
to the spirit of temporal power, and to shut herself
oti by an adamantine wall from one-half of the
Catholic Church.

In the Chapel Royal attached to Kensington
Palace the service is carried on entirely without
music !