From the point of view of a military despotism, the May laws are reasonable and necessary. As Germany is a great camp, the clergy, Protestant and Catholic, must be military chaplains amenable to the general in command. Military organisation, military discipline, and military obedience are exacted and expected in every department. A soldier cannot escape a duty because it disagrees with his liver, nor can a parson shirk doing what the State imposes because it disturbs his conscience. I have no doubt whatever that this is the real explanation of the Kulturkampf, and that all other explanations are excuses and inventions. Prince Bismarck no doubt hates the Pope, not because he cares a straw about religious principles and doctrines, but because the Pope is a power interfering with Imperial absolutism and military dictatorship. The Catholics are welcome to their tinsel and bones and masses, just as the Bavarian contingent is allowed blue facings, and the Brunswickers black, but the Pope and bishops must exercise no more real authority over priests and people than the King of Hanover or the Duke of Brunswick. The Chancellor, when he began the crusade, had probably no idea of the opposition he would meet with, and when the opposition manifested itself, it irritated him, and made him more dogged in pursuing his scheme. The State had met with little or no opposition in unifying the Protestant Churches, and making the mutually antipathetic Calvinism and Lutheranism merge their differences at the bidding of the Crown, and Prince Bismarck supposed he would meet with as little resistance from the Catholics. German Protestantism is so radically Erastian that the German mind is incapable of understanding the existence of a conscience which distinguishes between the things that be of God and of Cæsar. The theory of the Church as a spiritual body and not as a mere

establishment has always lived in the Anglican Communion. Indeed this theory has taken such a strong hold of the English religious mind that it has forced bodies of Christians to leave the Established Church, rather than allow their consciences to be directed by a purely secular authority such as the Crown or Parliament. Dissenting communities have organised themselves as spiritual corporations absolutely independent of the State. But in Germany, religion has been a matter of mere State police. The people believe or disbelieve at the bidding of their princes. They have not been consulted as to their views or wishes, but have been given what worship and creed their rulers have affected, and as their rulers have changed their shibboleths, so have the people been required to screw their mouths. Lutheranism has never formed one Church, with uniformity of liturgy and ceremonial. In Nürnberg its churches are undistinguishable from Catholic churches, and are adorned with statues of the Virgo im⚫ maculata,' relics, shrines, crucifixes, tapers, and burning lamps; in Norway and Iceland, with vestments, and wafers, and mass; in Würtemberg and Baden, the churches are bare as a music-hall. German religion, Catholic and Protestant, has been determined for the people by political circumstances. A village is Catholic if its feudal lord was of the ancient faith at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' If he accepted the tenets of Luther, his people were required to hold by the Confession of Augsburg; if he held by Calvin, to swear by the Institutes; and those who refused were expelled their homes. Consequently, scattered all over Germany, we find Catholic and Protestant villages side by side, with no mingling of confessions in

war.

'In St. Sebaldus, the perpetual lamp is still kept burning before the tabernacle, which, however, is empty; and the sixteen altars are spread with clean linen for daily mass, which is never said.

them; and the idea is so impressed on the people that a change of faith is a political impossibility, that such an event as a conversion from one form to another is almost unknown. The peasants of Schöndorf are Catholic today to a man, because, in the fourteenth century, the village was bought by a Bishop of Bamberg. The bauers of Bettberg are Lutheran, because in the twelfth century, by a marriage, their forefathers passed as serfs to the Margrave of Baden. The inhabitants of Blaubach are Calvinists, because the Count of Starkemburg embraced the reform of Geneva. As the lord of the land believed or disbelieved, so all his vassals were forced to believe or disbelieve also.

Very probably the Chancellor reckoned, when he began the Kulturkampf, on the Old Catholic movement becoming more general than it has. There is no doubt but that, on the promulgation of the decree of Papal infallibility, there was a great agitation of spirits among German Roman Catholics. The surrender by the bishops awoke universal disappointment, and the Alt-Katholic movement for a moment threatened the Church with a serious disruption. But the moment passed. The German mind abhors schism. Germany has suffered too much from being broken up into petty States to view petty sects with complacency. Consequently Methodism, Anabaptism, and other forms of Dissent have made no way in Germany.

If the bishops had risen to the occasion, protested their inability to receive the decree of the Council, and left the Pope to take what further proceedings he chose, they would have carried all Catholic Germany with them. Their submission unsettled for a moment the consciences of educated Catholics, and some readily joined the new sect that absurdly called itself by an old name. Prince

Bismarck probably knew that the parish priests were almost to a man anti-infallibilists, and disliked the political Catholicism of the sons of Loyola. But he did not know with what horror a Catholic regards separation from the centre of unity.

The schism of Ronge, entitled the 'German Catholic Church,' which rose as a rocket in 1845, came down as a stick before 1850; and the experiment was not worth repeating. Few priests joined the movement, and those who did were either men of learning who exercised. no influence over the common people, or men of strong passions who wanted wives; and the vulgar speedily took the measure of their sincerity. Among the laity, Old Catholicism has made recruits from those Catholics who wanted to marry Protestants, and who could not do so in the Roman Church, which set her face against mixed marriages; or from those who want to shake off their religious responsibilities, but do not care for the chill of Evangelical Protestantism. But the largest number of converts to Old Catholicism were made from the class of Beamten-Government officials. Herr von Mallinckrodt said in the House of Deputies (January 30, 1872):- You all know that in Prussia Catholics have not far to go to discover that offices of importance in every department are not given in fair division to them. Show me among the Ministry a single person who is not Evangelical. Look further among the under-secretaries, among the councillors-you must light a lantern to find one. Go into the provinces, seek among the chief judges, among the second judges of the law courts: you will not find one. Go further among the functionaries of Government, among the Landräthe, go to the universities, to the gymnasiums,

Unless a written agreement be drawn up that all the children shall be brought up Catholics.

count how many among the officials there are Catholic, and then compare the proportion with that of the Catholic population!' That this is by no means overstated I can bear testimony from having lived in a town which before 1807 had not, probably, a Protestant living in it. The troops garrisoning it are commanded almost entirely by Protestant officers. On the Emperor's birthday a brilliant array of staff-officers and generals attended the Evangelical Church, at the head of a handful of soldiers, whilst the great bulk of the troops were at the minster under a few lieutenants. The chief judge and his assistants are Protestants, the schools are given Protestant masters, and the university professors of the same confession.

Professor von Schulte says, in an article in the "Contemporary' for July, 1878, Protestant officials in all influential posts became the rule. Provincial and governmental chiefs, head magistrates, &c., were all Protestants. The Rhenish provinces had not one, Westphalia only one Catholic president; from 1815 to the present time scarcely half-a-dozen Catholic Ministers have been chosen; the number of councillors in the Government, the superior courts, &c., has never been anything like in proportion to the adherents of the two creeds among the population. The appointment of Protestant officials in Catholic districts, in courts of justice, &c., was, up to 1840, almost carried out as a system; an immense majority of officials of all grades were Protestants. It was carried so far that a vast number of Protestant gendarmes, apparitors, and other sub-officials, who have to be chosen from disabled soldiers, were brought from the Eastern provinces to Westphalia. . . . The circumstance that, in many cases, going over to Protestantism opened the way to a career, and vice versa, produced a great effect.' A friend of mine, the member of an old noble Catholic family, was