Catholic candidates for orders may not be admitted to holy orders before passing three years at a state university under the lectures of Protestant or infidel professors. On their entrance to the university they must matriculate to the satisfaction of those professors, and on leaving it they must pass a rigorous examination, also to the satisfaction of those professors.
A Catholic bishop may not appoint to or remove a Catholic priest from any parish without the permission of the Protestant government. If he does so, the marriages celebrated by such a priest are not recognized by law, and the children are consequently illegitimate in the eyes of the law! This too under a government which recognizes and encourages by every means in its power civil marriages, without the form of any religious ceremony whatsoever. Surely this is an Evangelical power!
Such, in brief, is a sketch of what these ecclesiastical bills mean. The sketch, hasty and incomplete as it is, requires no comment. A running comment is kept up every day, as readers may see for themselves, by cable despatches announcing penalties inflicted upon this bishop and that for refusing to obey laws that not only the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and the apostolic writings forbid him, under pain of losing his soul, to obey, but against which the heart of any man with an ounce of freedom and honesty in his nature must revolt as from a foul offence. But the cable tells not a tithe of the story. Every penalty of the law in all the cases mentioned above has been and is being rigorously, nay bitterly, enforced; and a milder mode of treatment is scarcely to be looked for from the recent return of Prince Bismarck to the Prussian premiership, with full control this time over the cabinet.
It is difficult, in these days and in this country of all others, to write or speak with calmness of this cool assumption of absolute power over soul and body—the souls and bodies of 40,000,000 of human beings whom God created—by one or two men, and of its hypocritical justification by appeals to the Deity himself.[177] It is still more difficult to speak or write with calmness of the undisguised or ill disguised approval which such barbarous enactments have evoked in free America in the columns of Protestant religious or quasi-religious journals. Is religious freedom one thing here and another thing in Germany? Or is this country indeed, as some allege, ripe for absolutism?
The spirit that would wipe out the church of Christ if it could, that stifles every breath of religious freedom, naturally and as a matter of course laughs at such a thing as pretensions to political freedom in any sense. Consequently, it was no surprise to see, in the face of the protest of the majority, the civil as well as foreign polity of the states that compose this German Empire, scarce yet two years old, transferred to the bureau that sits at Berlin. These states were free three years ago, governing themselves by their own laws. They must now be ruled internally as well as externally by the laws of the empire, that is to say, by Prussia; for the imperial chancellor is the Prussian premier, with full control over the cabinet. In a word, Germany is to be Prussianized. Prince Bismarck is no lover of half-measures. Already it was decreed, in spite of opposition, that the Prussian military code should serve for the whole empire. The bill for the organization of the imperial army retains the main features of the former organization. The term of military service is fixed at twelve years, and, as already seen, not even the orders which indelibly stamp a man as the consecrated priest of God, can save him from becoming a man of war.
Now, this one item of itself is sufficient to condemn this government in the eyes of humanity. What is the meaning of the words, "twelve years of military service"? Prussian military service is no playing at soldiers, be it remembered, like our militia here or in England. The average life of a man in these days probably does not much exceed thirty-six years. Yet in this new German empire the men who go to compose its 40,000,000 of human souls are compelled to devote one-third—the best twelve years of their lives—to what?
To serve in the armies of a tyrannical despot, who styles himself "William, by the grace of God"—to spend those best twelve years of their lives in learning the most expeditious method of killing their fellow-Christians! And that is what the glorious German Empire means.
What wonder that Germans should already fly in such numbers from this glorious and consolidated empire as to cause the same government that forbids freedom of religion to prohibit freedom of emigration? As all the world has seen, the German government is compelled to throw every obstacle in the way of its subjects to prevent their flying to this country. Does that betoken soundness, and a government grateful to the people? In the face of that one fact, it is needless to call to mind the riots that have continued at intervals throughout the year in various parts of the country, and the cruelty with which they were put down. What wonder that, even in the face of a military power, the Catholic party, persecuted as it is, should have gained, on Protestant concession, a small but decided increase on the vote of last year? What wonder that the liberty of the press should be attacked, and the journals that dared to publish the Papal Allocution confiscated?
It has been alleged all along that Catholics have been the foes of the unity of Germany. The allegation is utterly false. It is alleged by the Prussian government that they conspire against the empire, from the bishops down. Give us the proofs, say the Catholics; lay your finger on the words or the acts of conspiracy. The government refuses to take up the open, manly challenge. It knew that its charge was false. But had it, by any chance, been true, who shall say that a government that enforces such barbarous laws as those above given, which is compelled to resort to force in order to keep its subjects in the country, which compels every man to devote the best part of his life to preparation for war, whose revenues go only to swell vast armaments and fortify frontiers, which denies not only all religious but all political freedom—practically one and the same thing—is not a curse rather than a blessing to mankind? The German Empire, as it stands to-day, is nothing else than a rampant, military Prussian despotism—a danger not only to its sister nations in Europe, but to the world.
In Italy the story is much the same; and the wonder is the sufferance, in these days of vaunted enlightenment and freedom, of the utter violation and disregard on the part of governments of every human right, even to the seizure of private property. The bill for the appropriation by the state of church property passed through the Italian parliament. These fine words, "appropriation," "parliament," "debates," in this "house" and in that, seem to throw dust in the eyes of men who, when their own property is touched, are particularly keen-sighted, though the "appropriation" go not beyond a single dollar. This high-sounding measure simply means that the Italian parliament has forcibly taken possession of three millions' worth and upwards of property to which, in the face of earth and heaven, it had not one jot, one tittle, one shade of claim in any form.