not merely to represent certain theological or philosophical opinions, but maintains its right of intervention in the most important events of human life, such as birth and death, marriage and education, over which the State can never abandon its right of control.

It is a mere delusion and pretence to speak of violation of the liberty of the Church, when the State, threatened by an occult foreign power, takes proper measures to assert its independence and sovereignty. Within its own dominions every sovereign power must be supreme: it is impossible to admit of any partition of sovereignty, much less to vest it in a foreign and clerical association. England and Holland owe their freedom mainly to the resolution with which they treated a religious party ever ready to conspire with Jacobite pretenders and foreign despots in order to overthrow their constitution and Protestantism. It was mainly due to this policy that they were in later times enabled to give full scope and toleration to their former enemies, though such liberty accorded at an earlier period in the name of abstract toleration would have resulted in the triumph of the Inquisition.

But if the inalienable sovereign rights of the State must be secured at all risks, Government in doing so should keep within the proper boundaries. It is bad policy to appeal to the fanaticism of unbelief in order to crush the fanaticism of superstition, and to retaliate upon those who had formerly tried to crush religious liberty by turning the sword of the secular power against them. The moral feeling of a nation is bound up with its religious faith, and in assailing the faith or the religious observances of the people, the State would destroy in the great majority of its citizens the growth of all deep and disinterested convictions. History shows that whenever a nation has been given over to scepticism, the worship of money and force becomes supreme. To break the independent life of the Church, and to turn it into a mere branch of the civil service for the purpose of opposing Ultramontanism, is a remedy worse than the disease. Wherever a religious body has been degraded into a spiritual constabulary, life may have been made easier for the government, but it loses at the same time the chief benefit of religious teaching, the fostering of spontaneous feeling by the highest motives.

The laws ruling the debateable land between State and Church should therefore principally tend to prevent any encroachment of the different religious bodies upon the civil domain, but should never hinder them from fulfilling those tasks which the State cannot itself undertake, and which

nevertheless are of paramount importance for the national life; nor should the legal control which the State may reasonably claim ever go to the length of defeating the very objects for which a Church exists. But it is clear that in defining the boundaries between the civil and the spiritual domain, the State cannot proceed upon any abstract rule; even following the principles of strict justice, it cannot overlook the different position in which the religious communities stand to the State in general, and to each State in particular. In dealing with the Church of Rome, no government can disregard the fact that this Church denies in principle the sovereign rights of the State, and has never given up the medieval theory of its supe riority, whilst all the Protestant confessions frankly recognise those rights. Further, the numerical proportion of the different religious communities in every State must be taken into account. It makes a vast difference whether a country is almost entirely Catholic, as Italy, Spain, and Belgium, or entirely Protestant, as Sweden and Denmark; whether Catholics form a comparatively small minority, as in Great Britain, or a large majority as they do in Ireland; or whether they represent one-third of the population as they do in the German Empire. Another circumstance of great weight is that of the historical institutions of a State. The relation of the French Government to the Pope was very different when a Gallican Church and clergy existed from that which it presents at this moment, when nearly all the episcopal sees are filled by Ultramontanes. Italy, having to face the irreconcilable enmity of the Roman Court, had no choice but to adopt the principle of complete separation of Church and State, whilst our own National Church is united to the State by the laws of the land, which are at once the best security for the moderation of the clerical element and for the religious education of the people. These laws and this establishment we therefore most zealously uphold and defend. Lastly, regard ought to be taken to the general state of civilisation of a country. Catholicism in the South American Republics representing the only spiritual power, must take a shape very different from that which exists in Holland and Switzerland. The relations of Church and State thus depending upon an infinite variety of circumstances, can only be dealt with according to circumstances, and whilst full liberty should be given to every religious com munity for the exercise of its worship, the special relation in which it should stand to the State cannot be decided beforehand upon abstract principle. Nor can it be our task to go through all the possible forms the relation of Church and

State may assume: we merely invite our readers to throw a glance on the struggle of these two powers which has begun in Germany, and which evidently is destined to take an important place in contemporaneous history.

The kingdom of Prussia, formerly an eminently Protestant State, obtained by the conquest of Silesia in the last century a considerable number of Catholic subjects, which was largely increased by the acquisition of Posen and the Rhenish provinces in 1815. The relations of the Church of Rome and the Prussian Government were regulated by an agreement negotiated by Niebuhr, and embodied in the Papal Bull De Salute Animarum (1821), which, however, was not destined to realise the desired peace between Church and State. Formerly the German bishops, being themselves petty feudatories of the empire, had shown a considerable independence of the Holy See; they had resisted the interference of the Papal Legates in their affairs, and positively forbidden their clergy to accept any commands from Rome. We related at length in a recent Number of this Journal the vigorous resistance of many of the ablest German prelates of the last century to the encroachments of the Jesuits both in doctrine and practice. But being reduced to the state of subjects of Protestant princes, they became more and more dependent on the Pope; the worthy prelates who in the interest of their flocks resisted the aggressive spirit which began to pervade the Catholic Church since the restoration of the Jesuits, were compelled to resign, and their places were filled by determined Ultramontanes, who deliberately disregarded the established rights of the State. The conduct of the Prussian Government in this emergency was at once feeble and narrow: it had not the courage to oppose the first encroachments of the bishops, but tried to reconcile them by concessions; but when the Archbishops of Cologne and Posen, emboldened by this success, declared open war on the famous question of mixed marriages, the king put them into prison without a judicial procedure an arbitrary act which raised a violent storm throughout Catholic Germany, and made the prelates martyrs of religious liberty.

Nor was the policy of Frederic William III. more fortunate in regard to the Protestant Churches. He was convinced that the differences which had hitherto separated the Reformed from the Lutheran confession were practically obsolete, and he therefore attempted to fuse them into a United Protestant Church, of which he was to be the chief. This project met at first with considerable success, the opposition against the pre

vailing rationalism blending together all the shades of positive Protestantism; but when the king introduced a liturgy which he had principally composed himself, it was resisted by the Lutherans in Silesia. Frederic William, angry with this opposition, which he considered to be factious, undertook to put it down by expelling the refractory pastors, an act which likewise was resented as an arbitrary violation of religious liberty, and only served to strengthen the Lutheran separatist tendencies.

Frederic William IV., as crown-prince, had disapproved of these coercive measures, and in ascending the throne in 1840 endeavoured to establish better relations with the Church of Rome: he released the imprisoned archbishops, abolished the Placet by which the government controlled the intercourse of the clergy with the Pope, and established a Catholic department in the Ministry of Public Worship. With regard to the Protestant Church, the king wished to maintain the Union set up by his father, but to give it a more federative character by granting full liberty of worship to the Lutherans. But these two tendencies were not easily to be reconciled, and caused many conflicts between the stouter Unionists and the rigid Lutherans. Frederic William had further an earnest desire to make the Protestant Church more independent of the State, and to resign, as he said, his ecclesiastical authority into the right hands. He was in reality what we call in England a high-Churchman, and his mind was sorely vexed by the question of the Apostolical succession by episcopal ordination. He doubted whether he ought to appeal for the true tradition to the Archbishop of Canterbury or to the Bishop of Upsala, and after endless correspondence with Bunsen and other learned men, having himself written many elaborate memoranda on the future constitution of the Church, the only palpable result of his ecclesiastical policy was the establishment of a superior council (Oberkirchenrath), which was a somewhat more independent form of ecclesiastical administration.*

A movement such as the revolution of 1848 could not but greatly influence the relations of Church and State in Ger

*Nothing can be more curious than the correspondence of King Frederic William IV. with Bunsen on political and religious subjects, which has been recently published, with the sanction, we presume, of the Court of Prussia, and edited by Professor Ranke. The views of the king were in the highest degree enthusiastic, and he presents a singular example of a king of Prussia anxious to construct a hierarchy independent of his own civil authority. It has been the fate of his brother to reverse in many things the policy of his predecessor, but in nothing more than on ecclesiastical questions.

many.

The Catholic clergy were the first to see the chances which the general aspiration towards liberty offered to them: their spokesmen in the Frankfort Parliament represented the Church as a mere association, which, like all other societies, had a claim to unrestricted liberty. The Parliament accepted the principle, that every religious community was henceforth to rule its affairs independently; that none was to have exclusive privileges, and that no state-church should henceforth be acknowledged; but it added the clause, that religious bodies, like all other associations, remained subject to the laws of the State. This did not suit the Catholic leaders, and they convoked a meeting of the German bishops at Würzburg, in which these prelates maintained the inalienable right of free intercourse with the Apostolical See, the clergy, and the people, and the right to publish all papal and episcopal ' ordinances and pastoral letters, without the Placet of the sovereign.' They further maintained that the doctrine of 'the so-called appellatio tanquam ab abusu is in contradiction ' with the inalienable right of the Catholic Church to indepen'dent legislation and jurisdiction in all ecclesiastical affairs.' The bishops communicated these resolutions, which, whatever might be their intrinsic merit, were in flat contradiction with all existing legislation, to the German governments, which accepted them without remonstrance. Certain principles on the future relation of the recognised and established Churches having been introduced into the Prussian Constitution, the ministry invited the bishops to come to an agreement as to the position of the Catholic Church: the bishops replied this would be unnecessary, they being perfectly able by themselves to organise the independence of the Church. In the meantime the tide had turned: the revolution having degenerated into open insurrection had been vanquished; and the clergy, who had been the first to claim the benefits of liberty, persuaded the governments that they alone were able to resist and crush the revolutionary spirit; an era of Ultramontane ascendancy ensued, which reached its acme with the conclusion of the Austrian Concordat (1855). The war of 1859 not only broke Austria's supremacy in the peninsula, but destroyed in fact the temporal power of the Pope by reducing it to the patrimony of St. Peter. It was then that the Jesuits, all-powerful in Rome, conceived the plan of regaining their lost temporal power by pushing to its utmost limits the spiritual authority of the Pope. The proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was a feeler addressed to the bishops; they were not formally consulted, but merely invited to be present