The solemnization (!) of marriage is placed in the hands of the state.
Ecclesiastical seminaries are suppressed, and given over to the state.
Ecclesiastical students are for the future to be educated and appointed by the state.
Catholics must not subscribe money to build colleges of their own; if they do, those colleges will, like all the others, be appropriated by the state.
The bishops, the divinely appointed successors of the apostles, are only allowed to hold office at the will of the state.
He who disobeys is deposed from office by the state. The church is a thing of state. The human conscience is a thing of state. It has no rights, no thoughts, no feelings, no desires, that are not absolutely controlled by the state, “for in the kingdom of this world the state has dominion and precedence.”
There is the whole doctrine out, plain and undisguised. Those last words are taken from the speech delivered by Prince Bismarck to the House of Peers in the debate of March 10 on the question under consideration. And now that they are there, what is the state?
“The state is I,” said Louis XIV., and he was right in his estimate; but the fact of his having been right at the time when he made the boast did not prevent the French Revolution, rather helped it on, and does not prevent us to-day from repudiating the doctrine.
What constitutes the state in Prince Bismarck’s eyes? Is it the emperor, or himself, or Dr. Falk, or the German professordom? Is it the representatives of the country as collected in the Lower and Upper Prussian Houses? On the educational question, the Upper House, in which lay the strength of the conservative party, gave an adverse vote to the government, and the House was immediately dissolved. A number of mushroom peers were hastily created in an unconstitutional manner, and sent in as the creatures of Prince Bismarck, for the sole purpose of passing these bills, in order to give a show of free discussion, and make the measure of Prince Bismarck appear as the will of the nation. But does the following read like the speech of a man who was likely to favor free discussion, or rather, of one who pined for absolutism, and was determined to have it? It is an extract from the speech of the prince on resigning the premiership of the Prussian Parliament to Count von Roon: “There is no fear that Prussia will lose her legitimate influence in the federal government, even if the individual members of the cabinet are not on all questions at one.... Prussia’s territory making five-eighths of all Germany, she will always command the authority naturally belonging to her. Besides, the identity of the German and Prussian politics is guaranteed by the fact that the German Emperor and the King of Prussia happen to be one and the same person. I do not deny that the premier should be invested with more extensive prerogatives than are now his own. He might, for instance, be accorded the right of suspending the decisions of the cabinet until their approval or otherwise by the king; or he might be granted some other prerogative with a view to regulating the action of the administration. All this, I dare say, will come to pass in course of time, but, not being as yet conceded to him, he has to shift as best he may.... There is too much talking over one’s colleagues involved in the premiership to leave a man time for anything else.”
That speech was delivered some months ago. Since then, the speaker has come nearer to the boast of Louis XIV. This is how the echo of the German chancellor, the Berlin special correspondent of the London Times, speaks of it, with a cringing tone that to free stomachs brings an absolute nausea: “With a decisive struggle against popery looming ahead, it would be a great mistake in this loyal and king-loving country to strip the ministry of the authority it derives from representing the crown rather than the parliament”; whilst the Times itself remarks editorially, with a mental blindness strange indeed, if unintentional: “We do not anticipate any retrogression in the development of Prussia, but it seems inevitable that there should be some check in the progress of change, some slackening in the audacity of legislation, some disposition to rest and be thankful.”