The contrast between these proposals and the principles he had maintained in his earlier years was very marked; his old friend Kleist recalled the eloquent speech which in former years he had made against civil marriage.  Bismarck did not attempt to defend himself against the charge of inconsistency; he did not even avow that he had changed his personal opinions; he had, however, he said, learnt to submit his personal convictions to the requirements of the State; he had only done so unwillingly and by a great struggle.  This was to be the end of the doctrine of the Christian State.  With Gneist, Lasker, Virchow, he was subduing the Church to this new idol of the State; he was doing that against which in the old days he had struggled with the greatest resolution and spoken with the greatest eloquence.  Not many years were to go by before he began to repent of what he had done, for, as he saw the new danger from Social Democracy, he like many other Germans believed that the true means of defeating it was to be found in increased intensity of religious conviction.  It was, however, then too late.

He, however, especially in the Prussian Upper House, threw all the weight of his authority into the conflict.  It was, he said, not a religious conflict but a political one; they were not actuated by hatred of Catholicism, but they were protecting the rights of the State.

“The question at issue,” he said, “is not a struggle of an Evangelical dynasty against the Catholic Church; it is the old struggle ... a struggle for power as old as the human race ... between king and priest ... a struggle which is much older than the appearance of our Redeemer in this world.... a struggle which has filled German history of the Middle Ages till the destruction of the German Empire, and which found its conclusion when the last representative of the glorious Swabian dynasty died on the scaffold, under the axe of a French conqueror who stood in alliance with the Pope.[12] We are not far from an analogous solution of the situation, always translated into the customs of our time.”

He assured the House that now, as always, he would defend the Empire against internal and external enemies.  “Rest assured we will not go to Canossa,” he said.

In undertaking this struggle with the Church he had two enemies to contend with—­the Pope and the government of the Church on the one side, on the other the Catholic population of Germany.  He tried to come to some agreement with the Pope and to separate the two; it seemed in fact as if the real enemy to be contended against was not the foreign priesthood, but the Catholic Democracy in Germany.  All Bismarck’s efforts to separate the two and to procure the assistance of the Pope against the party of the Centre were to be unavailing; for some years all official communication between the German Government and the Papal See was broken off.  It was not till the death of Pius IX. and the accession of a more liberal-minded Pope that communication was restored; then we are surprised to find Bismarck appealing to the Pope to use his influence on the Centre in order to persuade them to vote for a proposed increase in the German army.  This is a curious comment on the boast, “We will not go to Canossa.”