In the Catholic sense Metternich was a religious man, since he recognized in the Roman Catholic Church the conservation of all that is valuable in society, in government, and even in civilization.  He brought Catholics to his aid in cementing political despotism, for “Absolutism and Catholicism,” as Sir James Stephen so well said, “are but convertible terms.”  Accordingly, he brought back the Jesuits, and restored them to their ancient power and wealth.  He formed the strictest union with the Pope.  He rewarded ecclesiastics, and honored the great dignitaries of the established church as his most efficient and trusted lieutenants in the war he waged on human liberty.

But I must allude to some of the things which gave this great man trouble.  Of course nothing worried him so much as popular insurrections, since they endangered the throne, and opposed the cherished ends of his life.  As early as 1817, what he called “sects” disturbed central Europe.  These were a class of people who resembled the Methodists of England, and the followers of Madam von Kruedener in Russia,—­generally mystics in religion, who practised the greatest self-denial in this world to make sure of the promises of the next.  The Kingdom of Wuertemberg, the Grand Duchy of Baden, and Suabia were filled with these people,—­perfectly harmless politically, yet with views which Metternich considered an innovation, to be stifled in the beginning.  So of Bible societies; he was opposed to these as furnishing a class of subjects for discussion which brought up to his mind the old dissertations on “the rights of man.”  “The Catholic Church,” he writes to Count Nesselrode, the Russian minister, “does not encourage the universal reading of the Bible, which should be confined to persons who are calm and enlightened.”  But he goes on to say that he himself at forty-five reads daily one or two chapters, and finds new beauties in them, while at the age of twenty he was a sceptic, and found it difficult not to think that the family of Lot was unworthy to be saved, Noah unworthy to have lived, Saul a great criminal, and David a terrible man; that he had tried to understand everything, but that now he accepts everything without cavil or criticism.  Truly, a Catholic might say, “See the glorious peace and repose which our faith brings to the most intellectual of men!”

In 1819 an event occurred, of no great importance in itself, but which was made the excuse for increased stringency in the suppression of liberal sentiments throughout Germany.  This was the assassination of Von Kotzebue, the dramatic author, at Manheim, at the hands of a fanatic by the name of Sand.  Kotzebue had some employment under the Russian government, and was supposed to be a propagandist of the views of the Czar, who had lately become exceedingly hostile to all emancipating movements.  In the early part of his reign Alexander was called a Jacobin by Metternich, who despised his philanthropical and sentimental theories,