“The Papal church is chiefly responsible for the decadence of the French mind.  The priests have long controlled the education of the nation and have striven to shut it out from all contact with the culture of America, Germany and England.  Under the rule of Napoleon III, the Jesuits obtained the guidance of nearly all the secondary colleges; Protestant schools were sedulously discouraged, and nothing was taught that could offend the mediaeval tastes of Rome.  When, two years ago, the French republicans had resolved to found a free and compulsory system of instruction for all France as the chief want of the nation, the papal bishops and priests suppressed the measure by all their arts.  They were resolved to have no education which they could not control.  The republican movement failed; Bishop Dupanloup and his associates succeeded once more in shutting out the light of knowledge from the people, and have sown the fires of warfare in the place of mental progress and moral culture.

“France, which has often made the most rapid progress toward reform, has also been the most successful leader of modern reaction.  Its revolutions have set in motion all other nations, but have failed to purify itself.  It is enslaved by a single church and ruled by Roman superstition.  At the recent assembly at Paris, of all the hierarchy of France, of Jesuits, Dominicans, Monks and prelates, it was resolved that all the strength of the papal party should be given to an effort to grasp the control of the higher education of the people, and make every college and seminary the teacher of the worship of the Sacred Heart; to confine instruction within the limits of Roman theology, and shut out more strictly than ever before the light of modern progress.  At a great and powerful meeting of all the Roman Catholic editors of France, a similar policy was resolved upon.  By a strange revulsion of sentiment the press was made to advocate its own restriction or repression.  The papal editors apparently sigh for a return of the mediaeval practices when Francis I. burned ardent printers in Paris, and the Sorbonne would have banished the printing press from France forever.  The Roman Catholic papers invoke the restoration of the Bourbons and of the temporal power of the Pope, and in the ardor of a new spirit of martyrdom offered themselves up to a spiritual bondage that must end in their own slow destruction and the death of the national intellect They would enforce anew that policy if isolation which has filled France with impurity, and left it the prey of emperors and marshals, princes and priests.

“France has thus displayed, since its first revolution, a most remarkable contest.  The spirit of freedom has more than once placed its people in front of human progress, and ever again the spirit of reaction has dragged them back into the abyss of mental and moral decay.  Its priests have invariably triumphed over its reformers.