7.  From this it is evident enough that assent is of two kinds.  There is firstly the assent of Divine Faith; and secondly there is the assent of religious obedience.  Neither can be dispensed with.  Both are binding.  All we affirm is that the one is not the other, and that the first must not be confused with the last.  A special kind of assent, that is to say, the assent of Divine Faith must be given to all those doctrines which are proposed to us by the infallible voice of the Church, as taught by Our Lord or the Apostles, and as contained in the original deposit [fidei Depositum].  They comprise (a) all things whatever which God has directly revealed; and (b) whatever truth such revelation implicitly contains.

These implicit truths are deduced from the original revelation, very much as any other consequence from its premisses.  For example.  It is a truth directly revealed, that the Holy Ghost is God.  But, since God is to be adored:  the further proposition:—­the Holy Ghost is to be adored; is also contained, though only implicitly, in revelation; and is therefore, equally, of faith.  So again; that Christ is man, is a fact of revelation; but the further proposition—­Christ has a true body—­though not explicitly stated, is implicitly affirmed in the first proposition.  All consequences, such as the above, which are seen immediately and evidently to be contained in the words of revelation, must be accepted as of faith.  Other consequences, which are equally contained in the original deposit, but which are not so readily detected and deduced, must be explicitly accepted as of faith, only so soon as the Church has publicly and authoritatively declared them to be so contained; but not before.  Thus, to take an illustration, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin is a fact contained from the beginning, implicitly locked up, as it were, in the deposit of faith, left by the Apostles.  Were it not so it never could have been defined; for the Church does not invent doctrines.  She only transmits them.  Yet, this doctrine is not so clearly and so self-evidently included, and lies not so luminously and unmistakably on the very surface of revelation as to be at once perceptible to all.  Hence, before its actual definition, a Catholic might deny it, or suspend his judgment, without censure; whereas, to do either the one or the other, after the Church has solemnly declared the doctrine to be contained in the teaching of Christ and the Apostles, would be nothing short of heresy.

“The Infallibility, whether of the Church or of the Pope,” says Cardinal Newman, “acts principally or solely in two channels, (a) in direct statement of truth, and (b) in the condemnation of error.  The former takes the shape of doctrinal definitions, the latter stigmatises propositions as ‘heretical,’ ‘next to heresy,’ ‘erroneous,’ and the like” (p. 136).

The gift of Infallibility, observes Cardinal Manning, “extends directly to the whole matter of divine truth, and indirectly to all truths which, though not revealed, are in such contact with revelation that the deposit of faith and morals cannot be guarded, expounded, and defended, without an infallible discernment of such unrevealed truths” (Vatican Decrees, p. 167).