“The state, of course, being responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants in every measure adopted, will have to be guided by a strict regard for what is just and upright. It will have carefully to refrain from meddling with the creed or interfering with the ecclesiastical institutions and usages immediately connected with the sphere of religious belief. Only the other day, the Minister of Education (Dr. Falk) expressed his conviction in the Lower House that, directly the new bills became law, the Catholic subjects would perceive that no one intended to injure their religious faith, oppress their church, or interfere with the preaching of saving truth.” (Dr. Falk’s convictions are of a piece with his notions of “truth.”) ... “In carrying through their present task, government is prepared to encounter serious resistance and much trouble; but it is also aware that the bills now under discussion, if once they become law, will supply it with effective means of exerting its authority.... If the washes of the government and parliament are fulfilled, the bills under discussion will be a work of peace.”
“That is, in case the bishops yield,” remarks the Prussian correspondent of the London Times. “In the other event, they are sure to be successively fined, deposed, incarcerated, and perhaps sent out of the country. All this the new legislation empowers the government to effect.”
The government, then, or the state, or whatever be the name by which Prince Bismarck chooses to be called, dreaded a powerful opposition. Nevertheless, it determined to pass these bills—which were absolutely uncalled for, as far as the harmony of the relations between Catholic and Protestant went, and that of either or both of these bodies with what ought to be the state, the true representative rulers of the people, and not a man or a few men elevated on the bayonets of a million soldiers—conscious that it was doing what the conscience of its people might of necessity endure for a time, but could never consent to. How long, then, did it take to bring this stupendous measure about, fraught as it was with all these consequences, and a cause of alarm and anxiety even to the government itself with all its bayonets?
The laws are dated January 8 of this year; they were presented to the Chamber on the following day, and, by the 21st of the same month, their first discussion is over. On April 25, they finally passed the Upper House.
In three months! A bill which altered throughout the whole relations between church and state in Germany, down to their minutest details; which involved the appropriation to state purposes of every ecclesiastical college or seminary subscribed for, and erected, and founded by the money of private individuals; which, involving as it does the suppression of the bishops and the clergy, as a necessary consequence hands over to the state a vast amount of funded property in churches and houses; which, above all this, meets religion at every turn, and makes it bow down and worship the state; which threatens a future of disturbance and danger of every kind—is pushed through both Houses of Parliament, and supposed to be fully discussed and decided on in a period of three months!
Why, a bill for the laying of a new line of railroad twenty miles in length would have required longer time and called for more discussion. There it stands now, law, and all Germany must obey it, because the state calls it law. On April 24, Germany could be Christian; on April 26, to be Christian is a crime against the state; to obey the dictates of conscience is a crime; to establish a school in the name of God is a crime; to establish a college for the education of God’s ministry is a crime; to obey the pastors, the priests, and bishops of God’s church, whom to obey hitherto was a virtue, is now a crime; to acknowledge the Pope as the head of the universal church, a crime; in a word, to be anything but German, body and soul, mind and heart and thought, is a crime, to be punished by all the rigor of the law!
Prince Bismarck, while he is about it, should go further. “To-day we will proceed to create God,” said a countryman of his, a philosopher, an enlightened man and apostle of the stamp of Dr. Falk, the putative father of these bills. The chancellor should create a German heaven to correspond with this German religion and reward its devotees, the worshippers of the divine state. What German Dante will arise to give us the Bismarck Inferno?
The steps which led up to this measure, the ingredients which compose it, the manner in which it was forced through, the meaning of it, and the effect, if carried out, it will produce on religion, have now been set before the reader, and he may fairly pronounce for himself upon the whole question. But the question asked at the beginning remains still unanswered: Why has all this come about? Why has so wise a statesman as Prince Bismarck is reputed to be raked up these embers of dissension, and fanned them into so fierce a flame? Is it to his advantage to turn one-third, the majority even, of his empire against him? Why, if the contest were not, as he and his supporters of the liberal and religious press allege, in a manner forced upon him, should he be so unwise as to run the danger of rending his empire asunder, and opening up that bitterest of difficulties, the religious question, which lay so quiet? In one word, was or was not the Catholic Church a danger to the new empire?
This is becoming the question of the day; and what concerns Germany concerns the whole world. The Catholic Church is a danger to the state.