The Coming Religious Struggle.
This is the way the English Independent, one of the leading papers in Great Britain, views the general subject in an article on “Washington and the Vatican.” Having alluded to the tremendous convulsion which threatens European society, in consequence of Ultramontane conspiracies, the writer says:— “It is not a little remarkable that a country so free as the United States of America from the throes and agonies of religious conflict, is beginning to show symptoms of the universal malady which the Old World States have inherited in the disastrous legacies of ancient religious wars. Judging from present appearances, America may soon be as deep in religious difficulty as Germany, and President Grant, who is Protestant to the backbone, may become the Bismarck of the New World. The pope and the president, the Vatican and Washington, are just at the opposite poles. There is hardly a social and political atrocity stigmatized in the syllabus which the government and the people of the United States have not committed. The principles which are most emphatically condemned by the pope, they glory in. They are, in fact, the advanced guard of that modern civilization which the syllabus summarily characterizes as ‘of the devil,’ and by right they ought for years past to have been bearing the chief brunt of the papal war.”