It is an old story, told from time immemorial by schoolmasters to their English-grammar classes, how that once on a time a Frenchman, who had the difficulty which most foreigners share with Southerners and Scotchmen in handling shall and will, fell into the Thames, and in peril of his life screamed out, “I will drown! No one shall help me!” The words exactly express the facts in the martyrdom of Pope Pius IX. With the government of Italy treating him to make himself entirely free of the whole kingdom, and with other nations bidding him welcome to their domains, he insists on continuing to be locked up in the Vatican palace (with the key inside of the door) and on being a persecuted prisoner. Whereat the world in general smiles; and our Irish fellow-citizens, and their guardian angels of the democratic and republican parties, groan with indignation. Superficial observers suppose, doubtless, that the pope’s martyrdom is only the sulkiness of an invalid old man in a pet at the loss of his priest-ridden little kingdom. They cannot see (and for the life of us we cannot, either) why the supreme jurisdiction of a ten-acre lot on the Vatican hill does not just as much fulfill all the necessities that are pleaded in defense of the temporal power as the jurisdiction of a hundred square miles of Roman territory, inhabited by very unhappy, uneasy, and rebellious subjects. But it is hasty to infer from this that the pope’s martyrdom is nothing but a fit of the sulks. We are disposed to think, on the other hand, that it has a weighty religious and theological significance. The most zealous of the theologians who have defended the doctrine of papal infallibility have agreed (so far as we are informed) in the exception that under fear or duress a pope may define error for truth. This is the only way in which it is possible for them to meet some of the gravest historical objections against the doctrine. And, consequently, this admission that the teachings of a pope under duress are fallible is the most cogent argument in favor of the temporal sovereignty, since (it is held) that is the only arrangement that can assure the faithful that the pope is not, in any given deliverance, under fear or constraint. These facts suggest an explanation of the curious farce that is playing at Rome to-day. The Jesuits, who have got their creature invested with a divine attribute, begin at once to be afraid of their own work. As in Mrs. Shelley’s nightmare of a story, their Frankenstein, which they have built up with such infinite labor, no sooner begins to move and walk than they are ready to run away from him, full of awful forebodings as to what he will do next. When a man’s sayings are liable to be received as divine revelation by three hundred millions of people, it is such a serious matter what his words shall be! What security is there against his wrecking all the pet schemes of centuries by one unlucky word in an encyclical? No possible security but this, to get him to play prisoner, and then the infallible is made fallible again, for the pope is under duress. Meanwhile, however, the church is in a most awkward and distressing dilemma. Archbishops Manning and Spalding had proved conclusively that it could not get along without the dogma of infallibility. Bishop Dupanloup and Archbishop Kenrick had proved with equal conclusiveness that it could not get along with it. The church might have chosen on which horn of this dilemma it would be impaled. As events have fallen out, it has got itself pierced through and through with both horns. First, by the enactment of the infallibility dogma it made itself responsible for all the ex cathedra follies, blunders, and heresies, of past popes, a position to which its antagonists have always sought to drive it, but from which heretofore it has always been able to wriggle away. And thus it has accepted all the disadvantages of infallibility. Secondly, by the locking up of the pope in the Vatican as a prisoner, the church completely forfeits all the alleged advantages of infallibility. Since the pope, being under duress, is fallible, there results what Dr. Weninger calls the “contradiction and absurdity” of “an infallible church with a fallible head.” The living, accessible tribunal to which all doubtful questions may be referred at once, is abolished almost as soon as it is fairly recognized as being absolutely essential to the faith of every believer; and the multitude of the faithful are remanded to the wretched Protestant necessity of following written documents, that are liable to be misinterpreted—only, instead of a handy little pocket Bible in their own language, like the Protestants, they are referred to a huge library of folios, which no man could go through in a lifetime, all in the Latin tongue, which neither they nor their fathers have been able to read. Does not this state of things offer some good apology, in the view of charity, for the frantic appeals of our Irish fellow-citizens against a state of things which (as Archbishop Spalding says, in a late pastoral) holds the poor pope a prisoner and almost starving?—The Independent.