there is no coördinate witness, teacher, or judge, who can revise, or criticise, or test the teaching of the Church.'

Again: The Church has indeed a history. Its course and its acts have been recorded by human hands. It has its annals, like the empire of Rome or of Britain. But its history is no more than its footprints in time, which record indeed, but cause nothing and create nothing.'

Again: "The tradition of the Church may be historically treated; but between history and the tradition of the Church there is a clear distinction. . . . The tradition of the Church is not human in its origin, in its perpetuity, in its immutability. The matter of that tradition is divine. But history, excepting so far as it is contained in the tradition of the Church, is not divine but human, and human in its mutability, uncertainty, and corruption. The matter of it is human.'

Finally, and an 'epigrammatic sentence,' if you will. 'The visible Church itself is divine tradition.'

The Archbishop characterises the process of the opposition of the so-called 'scientific historians' to the Vatican decree as 'essentially heretical. It was an appeal from the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, delivered by its common and constant teaching, to history interpreted by themselves. It does not at all diminish the gravity of this act, to say that the appeal was not to mere human history, nor to history written by enemies, but to the acts of Councils, and to the documents of Ecclesiastical tradition. This makes the opposition more formal; for it amounts to an as

sumption that scientific history knows the mind of the Church, and is better able to interprèt its acts, decrees, condemnations, and documents, either by superiority of scientific criticism, or by superiority of moral honesty, than the Church itself. But surely the Church best knows its own history, and the true sense of its own acts and documents. It is passing strange if the Church should be incompetent to judge of these things, and the scientific historians alone competent. is this but Lutheranism in history?'

What

Here then we have the real sentiments and words of the Archbishop of Westminster with regard to the relations between the Vatican definition and history.

Current anecdotes which ascribe' to him words antecedently improbable as his, and transparently absurd in themselves, ought, in fairness, at least to be interpreted in the sense of his undoubtedly uttered and ex professo words.

And do they contain one single statement, not only which is the equivalent of, but which could be colourably twisted into,-'the dogma of Papal Infallibility, when defined by the Pope in the Council, "triumphed over history"'?

The Vatican definition was indeed a blow to 'scientific' (sic) historianism, inasmuch as it rendered its practice both morally and logically impossible within the Church; and we have seen its natural issue in an exodus of such historians.

That it was a triumph over 'scientific history,' as these words are understood by those who profess to monopolise it, is abundantly, and to them but too painfully, manifest. Whether the Archbishop ever used

words verbally equivalent to these, I do not know; but they represent his meaning in the passages I have quoted from his Pastoral.

That he ever did use the words imputed to him I deny; that it was disingenuous to ascribe them to him, and equally disingenuous in the tract-writers to retail such ascription, I affirm.

I owe my readers an apology for so lengthened a refutation. It is not the merits of the Tract, but the position of the tract-writers, which has called it forth. The Tract is unworthy of them; but it is worthy of their cause.

W. H.

THE DIVINE TEACHER.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

You are searching after divine truth, and I congratulate you; for, sooner or later, you will most certainly find it; and when you have found it, you will have repose of mind, and peace of soul.

We have all of us a natural instinctive craving for the truth. It is what philosophers call the proper object of our intellects; that towards Desire of cerwhich they of their very nature tend, and by to man. the possession of which they are perfected.

tainty natural

When they possess it, they have rest. This is that repose of mind which absolute certainty produces, and which it alone can produce. The maximum of probability will not give absolute repose of mind; for the very fact of a thing being but probable implies that its opposite has something to say for itself, and that something is a disturbing element, and prevents absolute undoubting repose of mind.

There are various degrees of certainty; but the lowest of them is not only higher than the Degrees of greatest degree of probability, but it is in an certainty. entirely different order. A thing must cease to be merely very or most probable, before it can be in

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