Once more Abbot Butler has put us in his debt. It was not to be wondered at that the work involved in compiling his fascinating Life of Archbishop Ullathorne should have focussed his attention on the story of the unfinished Council in which Archbishop Ullathorne took so real a part though hardly one of the great protagonists in those immortal scenes.

Though the Council is famous for its definition of Papal Infallibility, curiously enough this was not one of the subjects marked for discussion, even though everybody knew long beforehand that it was to prove the great feature of the meetings. Quite rightly then does Abbot Butler present us with a history of the Council in which the Dogma of Infallibility is the key to all the discussions, even to those which preceded the gathering of the bishops. That the doctrine should ultimately be defined was not only a logical necessity but an historical one, for it is enshrined in the doctrine of the Primacy already defined at Florence. Moreover, as it were unconsciously, the Christian ‘sense’ of the truth of this doctrine lay at the back of all the disputes between the Papacy and the Christian kings which are so marked a feature of European history. Hence in his opening pages the Abbot gives us a really masterly survey of such thorny questions as that of the deposing power claimed by the Popes, and of the effort—begun at Constance and perpetuated in Gallicanism—to make the Pope in some way or other subordinate to an Oecumenical Council.