the principal functions of every religious community lies in the appointment of its ministers. The bishops may have exercised this right in a manner which was open to many objections, and their absolute rule might perhaps have been limited by giving a right of co-operation and control to the members of the parish in the choice of their priests.* But if the president of the province, who of course only acts under the instructions of the Minister of Public Worship, can interpose his veto upon any appointment which seems to him politically objectionable, the priest is simply made a civil functionary. The sanction will be given or refused according to the changing political tendency of the government; a liberal minister will confirm an appointment which a conservative would not, and vice versâ. Such proceedings may be possible in a national State-church, but no one will pretend that the Catholic Church in Prussia is in that position. But in truth never was any State-church, based on the civil legislation of the realm, subjected to restrictions and to control so inconsistent with the very existence of a hierarchy. The education of the clergy, the fitness of candidates for holy orders, the selection and nomination of priests, and the whole government of the beneficed clergy, including the infliction of ecclesiastical censures and punishments, cannot become matters of police. A Church under such conditions would be a Church ruled by the constable and the magistrate. All spiritual power and authority is denied it. To apply such a system to the Roman Catholic Church, with its lofty traditions of episcopal government, and its compact structure of authority, is simply to say that no such Church shall exist at all. But in truth no Protestant Church in the world, whether established or free, would for a moment endure such bondage. Try it in Scotland; you would be told that this is Erastianism run mad; and the people would rather go out to pray on the hill-side than obey such tyranny. Try it in England; not a member of the Church of England, whether clerical or lay, would tolerate for a moment the despotic intervention of the government in every act of the spiritual life of the nation. So with all our Nonconformist sects. A Church which ceases to educate, institute, and govern its ministers and members, ceases to be any Church at all. To punish men for the dis

* This has indeed been attempted in one of the supplementary bills of the year, but we greatly doubt whether it will still have any effect; for the struggle having been begun, it would be playing the part of the Government if the Catholics proceeded to elect priests, who besides would forthwith be excommunicated by the bishops.

charge of duties which are of the essence of their sacred character, is the grossest form of injustice and intolerance.

One thing, we agree, the State is quite at liberty to do. The State is not bound to pay or maintain religious Churches, or sects, which it does not approve. Indeed, if these conditions. are annexed to the acceptance of State payment, the Church herself would do well to reject the terms. But will Prince Bismarck withdraw the stipend, and set the Church free? Nothing of the kind. There is no freedom of religious orders or communities in Prussia. The whole spirit of these laws is to make every form of religious belief and organisation as subservient to the State as a Prussian recruit is to the rattan of a corporal. That we abhor and denounce as an intolerable oppression; and it is only by the strangest perversion of judgment that any Englishman can have imagined that the cause of true religious liberty was identified with the policy of Prince Bismarck.

The most extraordinary feature of these laws is the Royal Court for Ecclesiastical Affairs. It may be well that religious communities shall only be allowed to pronounce strictly clerical punishments. The misuse which Catholic superiors have made of their authority by shutting up their subordinates in penitentiary establishments, or even by inflicting corporal punishment upon them, has been scandalous, and should on no account be tolerated by the State. But the case is very different with the provision, that if a servant of a church is deprived of his office against his will he may appeal to the Royal Court for Ecclesiastical Affairs, which decides whether the deprivation shall be valid or not. The president of the province may also appeal, if he thinks it in the public interest. It is difficult to overrate the scope of this provision, for the Court, in deciding whether the deprivation is justified or not, virtually decides the question of doctrine or discipline which has been the reason of the deprivation. Suppose a Catholic priest rejects the Infallibility, or a Protestant minister denies the divinity of Christ; their ecclesiastical superiors declare them unfit to fill any longer their office, because they have placed themselves without the pale of their Church; they appeal to the Court, as of course the deprivation is pronounced against their will. The Court, if it should decide that the proceeding against them is not justified, virtually declares that a priest rejecting the Infallibility can remain a servant of the Catholic Church; or that a clergyman denying the divinity of Christ is not unable to fill his place in the Protestant Church. But no qualification is required of the eleven members of this Court, which decides

without appeal, but that five of them must be chosen among the public judges. Will they have the requisite knowledge in ecclesiastical history, doctrine, and law to decide questions which touch the very essence of a Church, and is it equitable that a mixed tribunal of Protestants and Catholics should pronounce indiscriminately on such questions? Can it be expected that in matters regarding the doctrine of the Catholic Church, Catholics should consider a judgment as binding which is given by a Protestant majority? or that Protestants should consider Catholic judges as competent to decide on vital questions of their faith?

We think these observations go far to sustain the grave doubts we entertain of the justice and policy of these laws. Their general character is a revival of Josephinism-the government of the Church by the State. But Joseph II. failed in his attempt to reform the Catholic Church by his enlightened absolutism, in an age when the bishops were admirers of Voltaire; and we doubt whether Dr. Falk will be more fortunate at a time when Ultramontanism is rampant. This leads to another question. The gravest fault a statesman can commit is to make a law which cannot be executed; and we think that these Church laws cannot be executed. The Protestant Church in Prussia, indeed, is not able to offer any serious opposition, because it has no independent organisation. The King is its head, and he appoints its ministers and rules supreme over it. But does Dr. Falk really think that the Catholic Church will tamely submit to laws which tend to change its whole nature? It seems to us perfectly idle to contend that similar restraints have been placed upon it in other countries; that the appellatio tanquam ab abusu exists in France; that in Würtemberg the government may veto the appointment of priests, etc. Even if all the single provisions were not new, the laws as a whole are new: they form a system whose parts are in intimate connexion with each other. They were designed as an engine of war against the Roman Church: if it could accept them as a binding rule it would cease to be what it means to be, an infallible teaching body, and would become a creature of the Court for Ecclesiastical Affairs. It was therefore vain from the beginning to expect that the bishops would acquiesce in this measure. Immediately after the publication of the laws they assembled at Fulda, addressed a solemn protest against them to the government, and refused their assent to the execution of provisions which attacked the very essence of the Catholic Church. They could give no other answer.

Nor do we think the Prussian Government will be able to enforce the laws. The bishops have continued to appoint priests without presenting them to the sanction of the president of the province; they have been heavily fined, but the limit of such fines lies in the ability to pay; if the whole salary and private fortune of the prelates are absorbed, there is an end of it. If they are put into prison, as Archbishop Ledochowski and the Bishop of Treves have already been, they will only be made martyrs; but there is no more dangerous man than a martyr. If they remain firm, as they are sure to do, what next? If they are banished, like the Jesuits, they will cross the frontier and govern their dioceses from the next foreign town; and if the government asks the Vicar-General to take the direction of affairs, he will answer that he is unable to do so, as the see is not vacant. Of course the government may do great harm to the Church; it may disorganise it; it may even reduce the Prussian Catholics practically to the state in which the Papal interdict placed a country in the Middle Ages which deprived whole communities of the sacraments they conceive to be necessary to their salvation; but the government will not succeed in forcing the bishops against their will to ask its sanction for their appointees, provided the whole clergy remains firmly united and is supported by the laity. And we believe that this will be the case, because all feel that this is a decisive battle for the whole Catholic Church, whose eyes are turned upon them. Many Catholics were heartily ashamed of the ignoble part which the German bishops played at the Council, and detested the tricks by which the battle of Infallibility was won; but they have waived their opposition since the independence of their Church was in question. The best proof of this are the recent elections for the Reichstag, in which the Ultramontane party has gained enormously. In the last session it numbered sixty-three members; it now reckons a force of more than one hundred. Such figures speak volumes; they show that hitherto the effect of the laws has been just the reverse of what was intended. It was expected that they would emancipate the Catholic laity from clerical control; they have only served to defeat that object, and to show that the laity support their clergy.

The result of the elections has seriously startled the Prussian Government, and Prince Bismarck's confidence in the success of his campaign is perhaps not unshaken. The most headstrong minister might ask himself whether the possible gain of injuring the Catholic hierarchy is worth more than the certain hostility of eight millions of Catholic subjects. The government had hoped unquestioning obedience to its

decrees, because the habit of obedience to the law is deeply rooted in the population; they entirely miscalculated the resistance they were going to encounter, and the force of religious passion when once roused. Their difficulties are now immensely increased, yet the struggle is still too fierce to make a compromise possible. Supplementary bills have been produced and will be passed, but they will not succeed in breaking the passive combined opposition of the clergy and the laity.

Prince Bismarck has accustomed the German chambers to very arrogant and dictatorial language, which would not be tolerated for an instant from a minister in any other country, or in any really constitutional assembly. With what he says to his own countrymen we have nothing to do but when he extends his invectives and his insults to foreign countries, he may be reminded that they have rather more experience than he has acquired both in debate and in ecclesiastical government. He has attempted to browbeat the bishops of France and Belgium, whose rights are recognised and protected by their national laws, forgetting apparently that the enemy he has challenged to this contest is ubiquitous, and that his own locus standi is a very narrow one, a large portion of the Prussian dominions and population being of the Roman Catholic persuasion; and that he is powerless beyond his own frontier. We confess we are indignant at the exaggerated pretensions of the Ultramontane clergy; but we are much more indignant at the attempt to crush the faith and independence of any form of religious belief by State persecution and intolerance.

We must, therefore, come to the conclusion that with these laws the government have engaged themselves in a false path, and that the result of this policy will prove the truth of Luther's saying, You can not draw the sword against a 'ghost.' There will still be ups and downs in the struggle, and Prince Bismarck's skilful strategy will profit by the faults of his adversaries, such as the foolish letter of the Pope to the Emperor; but such incidents do as little towards deciding the principal question as sympathising meetings in England in favour of, and angry pastoral letters in France against, the position taken by the Prussian Government. It is the right and the duty of the State to vindicate its sovereign rights against the encroachments of any religious community. The Pope had given fair warning to the German Government that every consideration would be subordinated to the restoration of the temporal power; and as Germany can never favour that design, it might well expect a hostile attitude of the Court of Rome. Therefore, if the Prussian legislation had been simply inspired