Political Aggressions of Papacy.
By J. H. W.
MANY have blamed Prussia for her determined action against the Church of Rome. But how any government can protect the rights of its citizens and pursue any other course than that pursued by Prussia, is not easy to see. Gladstone has conclusively shown to the minds of the English people that Romanists cannot be loyal subjects of any power but that of the pope. The following from the Christian Statesman shows how the matter is one of constant agitation: "Not many years ago, England repealed her laws debarring Roman Catholics from Parliament. This measure was hailed as a sublime triumph of liberal principles, and a pledge of peace, in politics at least, between Catholic and Protestant forever. To secure it, Catholic prelates most solemnly affirmed that nothing in their faith impaired the perfection of their loyalty in civil matters, to the sovereign and the laws of the land, and generous minds believed that English Catholics would henceforward be found the most trusty subjects of the realm. To-day, while Mr. Gladstone, a leader in the act of 'Catholic emancipation, is still in the fulness of his strength, the prelates of Rome in England, with the almost unanimous assent of their followers, declare that their obedience in all things, civil and ecclesiastical, is due first of all to the infallible teacher of morals who sits at Rome. Mr. Gladstone himself is engaged in a strenuous controversy, maintaining with a logic which no one seriously attempts to gainsay, that a consistent Catholic cannot be a trusty citizen of the British realm. The Pall Mall Budget, recently, without attempting to solve the tremendous problem, confessed that England has failed, as yet, to obtain a settlement of the question. Its words are significant, and some too sanguine Americans may learn a lesson from them. ""What reflecting Englishmen clearly perceive is, not that Roman Catholic emancipation was demonstrably unwise, but that it has in no way solved the most formidable of problems, the question of the proper mode of dealing with the Roman Catholic Church. It might have been reasonably supposed that the grant of absolute equality would have turned the Roman Catholics into citizens of the State like any others, and that the special creed of Ireland would no more affect the interests and policy of the empire than the special creed of Scotland. But they find that a religion with world wide affinities is not as the faith of a limited community, and that they have given an enormous advantage to a system of aggressive spiritual legislation of which the basis is the denial, and the object the suppression, of most things which Englishmen believe and prize. We may be quite alive to the coarseness of the measures by which German statesmen endeavor to cope with this difficulty; but there is not one Englishman in ten who now thinks that we have successfully or finally dealt with it by leaving it to solve itself.""