“For this reason the present conflict with the church in Prussia ought not to be pushed so far as to bring her power as low as the state has brought that of the Evangelical Church. If the Catholic Church is to fulfil the great social mission which we have just described, and which consists essentially in her maintaining an equilibrium between freedom and obedience, which is indispensable to society and the state, her external power and internal organization must not be interfered with in a way to render the accomplishment of this exalted mission impossible.”[47]
Herr Joerg, the editor of one of the first reviews of Germany, has said that Prince Bismarck has done more to strengthen and make popular the Catholic cause in the empire than the two hundred Jesuits whom he has exiled could have done in half a century. This, we believe, is coming to be generally recognized. The war on the church was begun with loud boastings. Men of high position declared that in two years not a Catholic would be left in Germany. The prince chancellor disdained to treat with the Pope or the bishops, and defiantly entered upon his course of draconic legislation to compel to his stubborn will the consciences of eight millions of Prussian subjects. He is not able to
conceal his disappointment. With glory enough to satisfy the most ambitious he could not rest content, but must court defeat. All his hopes have fallen to the ground. The Old Catholics who were to have been his most powerful allies have sunk into the oblivion of contempt; the priests whom he expected to throw off the authority of their bishops have not been found; the uprising of the laity against their pastors has not taken place; the bishop who was to have put himself at the head of a German Catholic Church has not appeared; the Falck laws have not served the purpose for which they were enacted, nor have the numerous supplementary bills met with better success. He has indeed made his victims personally most uncomfortable; bishops and priests he has cast into dungeons, monks and nuns he has driven forth from their homes and their country to beg the bread of exile; laymen he has sent to jail for speaking and writing the truth; but with all this he has not advanced one step towards the end he aims at. He has not made a breach in the serried Catholic phalanx. His legislation has nearly doubled the number of Catholic representatives in the parliament; it has given new life and wider influence to the Catholic press; it has welded the union of bishops, priests, and people, and bound all closer to the Pope. From their dungeons the bishops and priests come forth and are received in triumph like conquering heroes; imprisonments and fines of Catholic editors serve only to increase the circulation of their journals. In the meantime the radicals and revolutionists are gaining strength, crime is becoming more common, and the laws aimed at the church are beginning to tell
upon the feebler organizations of Protestantism. Since the law on civil marriage has been passed comparatively few contract matrimony in the presence of the Protestant ministers; great numbers refuse to have their children baptized or to have the preachers assist at the burial of the dead. The government has become alarmed, and quite recently circulars have been sent to the officials charged with carrying out the law on civil marriage, in which they are instructed to inform the contracting parties that the law does not abrogate the hitherto existing regulation concerning ecclesiastical marriage, and that they are still bound to present themselves before the clergyman and to have their children baptized as formerly. The service of the police, we need scarcely say, is not required to induce the Catholics to seek the blessing of the church upon their marriage contracts or to have their children baptized.
The result of all this is that many wise and large-minded men, like Von Hoffmann, Von Gerlach, and Von Kirchmann, have lost all sympathy with the policy of Bismarck towards the Catholic Church, as well as confidence in its success. They now thoroughly understand that, were it possible to destroy the church, this would be an irreparable misfortune for the fatherland. The state needs the church more than the church the state. She can live with Hottentots and Esquimaux, but without her neither liberty nor culture can be permanent. It must also be humiliating to Prince Bismarck to see with what little success those who have sought to ape him have met. Mr. Gladstone, from faith in the chancellor, thought to bolster up a falling party by “expostulating” with the Pope, and he has succeeded only in finding himself
in the company of Newdegate and Whalley. President Grant has been made to believe that the Pope is such a monstrous man that by means of him even a third term might become possible; and he will retire to the obscurity of private life with the stigma of having sought to stir up religious strife for the furtherance of his own private interest.
[37] April, 1874, p. 195.
[38] Romans xiii. 1, 2.]
[39] The British Quarterly, January, 1875, p. 17.
[40] Luke x. 16.