VOL. IV.

Il, while the flying backs of Israel's foes
Struck on my sight, that sight had been my last-
If, while the shouts of Israel's victory rang
Upon my ears, my ears had closed in death.
Now shall I live thro' many a lonely year
To see my deed and me to history grow;
And men shall call me great, and deem me great,
But other thoughts than live on lips in words
Shall nestle voiceless in their inmost hearts;
And women who may envy me my fame
Shall grudge me not the doing of the deed
From which my fame was born.

When I am old,

And when my hand is weak, and white my head,
They shall divine a fierceness in my eyes,
And judge by all they heard, not all they see;

And they shall hedge my name and me with state,
And make my face part of each festival;

But mothers who, me childless, shall proclaim
Mother of Israel, yet shall shrink to lay

Their innocent children on my widowed lap;

And innocent maids shall shudder secretly,

And deem that blood, though justly shed, leaves stain
Upon the hand that shed it, and deem too

The deed that made me great left me unsexed.

By it shall I be known; the woman's part

In me shall be forgotten, or recalled

To raise the strangeness of my manlike deed.
Judith, who quailed not when her enemy's head
Beneath her robe distilled the gory drops,-

Who struck not once, but twice, and sawed the head
From off the wine-steeped carcass of its lord-
Who wound with fearless footstep thro' the camp,
And from the white lips of her enemy's head
Forced voiceless augury of the morrow's fight:
These shall men know!

But not the Jewish maid
Who gave her young heart to her heart's young lord
And found the path of love and duty one,

Leading her feet within Manasses' gates

Not her, who out of common household cares
Made links to bind her to her husband's heart,
Was joyful in his joys, and in her dreams
Saw him in honour at the city gates
With Judah's elders, nor could even dream
Of any fame save what must come thro' him-
Not her, whose heart was soft and womanlike,
So large that, like a hospitable house
That shelters not alone the present guests
But keeps a place for any guest God sends,
Within that woman's heart she kept a place
For children and grandchildren of her hope.

But never child of mine shall stroke my face,
Nor touch those chords within my lonely heart"
That only baby fingers skill to touch.
Thro' time to be, my child shall be my deed.

Ꮓ

THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO SOCIETY.

BY THE REV. EDMUND J. O'REILLY, S.J.

XXIII. THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE (continued).

WERE the Decrees we have been considering confirmed by Martin V? As a help towards solving this question, I will propose and answer another, which is, besides, worthy of attention for its own sake. What was the original character of the Decrees themselves; to what class or category did they belong? Were they dogmatic definitions?

Reverting to the circumstances of the time, we must remember that the then actual state of things in the Church was anomalous and without example in preceding centuries. The position of the Council. and the work it had to do were likewise out of the common course. No General Council before that of Pisa was ever called on to determine who was-or was to be-Head of the Church. No previous legitimate Council had assembled and deliberated, as it did, not only without the approbation, but against the will, of the Roman Pontiff. Other Councils had been presided over by the Pope, either personally or through his legates. This Council took, within certain limits, the place of the Pope as well as its own. It undertook to exclude from all ecclesiastical power the two claimants to the Papacy, one of whom -whichever it may have been-was till then the rightful claimant. Having displaced both, it substituted another, with the hope that he would be universally recognised. But in this hope it was disappointed: there came to be three claimants instead of only two. The Council of Constance had to accomplish the task which that of Pisa failed to accomplish. This latter Council had, I will assume, validly dethroned Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII., and validly seated Alexander V. in the Chair of St. Peter. But it had not silenced the deposed parties nor their adherents, whose number continued considerable. The Council of Constance, which was in some sort a continuation of that of Pisa, and, at any rate, heir to its incomplete work, had reason to fear a similar failure for itself, and might look forward to the danger of setting up a fourth rival, as Pisa had set up a third.

Under this pressure the Fathers, or many among them, considered it expedient to proclaim their rights and powers, to themselves or to each other for their own encouragement, to the fugitive Pontiff, who was increasing their difficulties, and to the rest of the Church. This they did in the Decrees we are discussing, and which were an assertion of the Council's position and prerogatives, and of those of other possible future Councils. But, we may ask, did they intend to define the doctrine involved in this assertion, whatever was the extent of its meaning; whether that meaning was confined to present and other similar circumstances or not; whether, again, it regarded certain or only doubtful Popes? It is quite plain that the chief object and end

of these Decrees was to strengthen the hands of the Council, and not to settle a doctrine for its own sake, and for the sake of the integrity of the Faith, as this very Council did later with regard to other matters. Besides, whatever weight the Fathers wished these Decrees to have, they wished them to have it there and then, and not dependently on a future confirmation of an undoubted Pope, when all the troubles that made the Decrees so peculiarly important at the time should have passed away. The Fathers knew that the supreme, independent right to define could be as readily questioned as the right to command, and even more readily, because there might be, and there was, an urgent necessity of commanding, but not of defining. For commanding there was a necessity such as would justify the inference that God had given the right, since He could not be wanting to His Church in what was strictly needful. I do not mean that they imagined, or that we are to imagine, any fresh communication of power made at that time, but that God must have so constituted the Church from the beginning that it would be able to meet any emergency which He would allow to arise; and an emergency had arisen, which demanded an unusual kind of action on the part of a Council. This was understood by those who convoked the Council of Pisa and by that Council itself; this was understood, too, quite clearly by the Fathers of Constance. The Council of Pisa had acted on the doctrine; the Council of Constance was about to act on it; but conceived there was occasion for stating it, for laying it down.

We may observe here, by the way, that the Council of Constance laboured under a difficulty superadded to those whereby that of Pisa was embarrassed, inasmuch as there was now actually a person with clearer claims to the Pontifical throne than either Gregory or Benedict, and who had alone called the Council as it then stood, and the Council was beginning to be in collision with him.

I said the Council conceived there was occasion for stating the doctrine concerning its own power. It may have overstated this doctrine, but it cannot be blamed for simply stating it. I may be asked, if this was not a definition, what was it? I say, if it was not a definition, it was a declaration, such as assemblies, and committees, and courts make as to their own completeness and authority and jurisdiction. Such declarations neither give power nor heal substantial defects - though they may heal minor formal defects-nor oust a higher jurisdiction. They express a prudential judgment; they raise a respectable presumption, which, however, may be afterwards overruled; they allege a ground for proceeding to action; they afford a confidence proportioned to the dignity and intelligence of those who make the declaration. It stands to reason that no number of persons can by their own word make themselves more than they are already. If a tribunal be acknowledged as simply supreme without any superior on earth, its own claim to do certain acts must be recognised as involving a sort of practical infallibility; and if it be acknowledged as actually infallible in doctrine, its doctrinal teaching as to its own sphere both of doctrine and action must be accepted. Nay more, its solemn exercise of authority to teach on a particular subject would irrefragably

imply that the subject was within its competence. But a Council without the Pope never had been universally acknowledged as simply supreme, nor as infallible. I have said that the Decrees, if not a

definition, were a declaration in the sense explained.

But were they a definition or not? I say they were not. The first of the two Decrees-that of the fourth session-regarded that Council alone. There is not in it, as I before observed, a tittle of generalization. Now, it would be a strange and unusual kind of proceeding to define as a matter of Faith the supreme authority of an individual Council, and more strange still to define this by itself, without previously defining the general proposition that Ecumenical Councils, considered distinctly from the Pope, are invested with supreme authority, the general proposition not being already a received Doctrine. of Faith. This definition too would include the Ecumenicity of the Council at that time, an obscure question of fact, concerning which the Council would hardly have undertaken to teach dogmatically. Even in the Decree of the fifth session, though other possible Councils are spoken of, the Council of Constance is put in the first place, as the primary object of the statement.

*

Then, there is no phrase or form of speaking employed in either Decree that would indicate an intention to define any doctrine. The Council says that it ordains (ordinat), disposes (disponit), lays down (statuit), decrees (decernit), and declares (declarat) the things that follow. There is not a word about teaching as an undoubted truth, or teaching at all, there is not a word about condemning, as heretics, or otherwise unsound, those who may think otherwise; there is not a word to show that the Council exacts the admission of any doctrine. What it does exact is obedience to its own future orders, and those of other Councils which may follow, with threats of punishment to be inflicted on those who may prove refractory. The drift then and meaning of the Decrees is that the Council wishes its own authority, and, on similar grounds, that of any other Councils that may follow, to be recognised, and its and their orders to be complied with. The authority which it asserts and desires to have accepted is put forward as the foundation of that obedience it proposes to enforce. But obedience alone to its orders, not belief in its right, is the obligation. imposed.

I do not mean to deny that there were men in the Council who entertained exaggerated notions concerning the authority of a General Council, and who would have been disposed to atttribute to it superiority over even an undoubted Pope. The circumstances of the time favoured such notions and such a disposition. In the first place, a larger share of responsibility had been thrown on the Councils of Pisa and Constance than on any previous Council, as disjoined from the Pope, in providing for the needs of the Church. A new occasion

* In some MS. copies of the Decree in the fourth session, and in Labbe's text of that in the fifth, the word defines (definit) occurs after ordains (ordinat). But this makes no matter, as the same word is used in the disciplinary dispositions which follow. This appears from a sentence quoted further on in the present paper (high up in p. 322).

had arisen at that period for the interference of a Council. It seemed, under some respects, desirable that a Council should possess unshackled jurisdiction. Men's minds were turned towards the inquiry as to how far a Council could go, and at the same time towards making the best case (that could be made for a Council; and it is not to be wondered at if there were those who would strain a point to exalt the position of Ecumenical Councils generally. Once certain persons begin to theorise in a particular direction, they easily originate new and incorrect views, of which they become enamoured, and they seem to themselves to find good reasons for sustaining those views, and often succeed in rendering them plausible to others. the present case, though it cannot be shown that the Decrees mean more than is consistent with what we hold in conformity with the Vatican definition, yet they may have been coloured by those leanings to which I have alluded. But, whatever was their meaning, they were not a definition, as I have already gone some way towards proving, and will now prove more fully still.

In

What I have called the Decrees of the fourth and fifth sessions are followed in each by certain resolutions and enactments, forming part of the same context, and the same whole, with the Decrees. In other words, each of the so-called Decrees is only a portion-the first portion-of one document proposed to the Council and passed by the Council, the remainder consisting of disciplinary determinations or dispositions. In the fourth session the whole of this document is thus prefaced and described in the Acts: "The Lord Cardinal of Florence read some constitutions to be observed by the Council, the tenors of which (constitutions) are inserted below."* Then, just before the text of the document, immediately preceding the Decree, as we have called it (which is the opening portion of the document), we read:-"The tenor of the said constitutions of which mention is made above, follows, and is to this effect (talis.)" In the fifth session the corresponding document is headed and described as: "Certain chapters (capitula) in the nature of synodal constitutions." It is quite clear that this document, read and passed in the fifth session, is of the same nature and character as that of the fourth, and therefore, could be described, like that of the fourth, as "Constitutions to be observed by the Council." I infer from all this that the enacting element, if I may so call it, was the principal object, and the principal thing established by the Council, in passing these documents or constitutions. The statement, which we have been calling a Decree was a preliminary declaration commencing each of them, commending the Council and its disciplinary dispositions. In the introduction and the headings no special distinctive place or force is assigned to this declaration. It goes in with the rules and regulations made by the Council. In both sessions the declaration, which we have called a Decree, is immediately, and in the same context, followed by preceptive disciplinary rules connected with what precedes by the adverb also (Item.) In the fourth: "Also that our Most Holy Lord Pope John XXIII.

* Labbe and Cossart (Venice 1731) Tom. 16, p. 66..

+ Ibid, p. 73.