The Roman church has always held a supremacy above the law.  Of all the national institutions, it has alone preserved its freedom of action unimpaired.  It receives an enormous subsidy from the state.  While all other associations are held under a strict subjection, while political meetings are scarcely allowed, while the press is silenced, while Protestant churches can hold no assemblies or synods except by the connivance of the government, while Protestant churches are forbidden to have either bell or steeple, the Roman priesthood hold their councils and assemblies unrestrained, and cover the land with their sodalities, their societies, their processions, and their pilgrimages.  The church is the only well-organized political party.  Its agents are active in every commune.  Its severe discipline produces order through all its hosts of Jesuits, monks and priests.  Its confessors rule in the palaces of the wealthy and the hovels of the peasants.  It forbids education, it stifles thought, it inculcates a pitiless severity against Protestants and reformers; and with natural indignation the leading Republicans point to the dominant church as the chief source of all the woes of France, as sacrificing the morals, integrity and mental elevation of the nation to the single purpose of maintaining the ascendency of a foreign Pope.  The French Republicans have been forced to see that the Papal church is the necessary foe of freedom.  It would be well if our own people could learn from their experience, and guard with strict vigilance their institutions from the secret and open assaults of a foreign priesthood.

“There is no doubt, at least in the minds of the French Republicans, that to the intrigues of the Papal faction is due the disordered and hopeless condition of the nation.  Gambetta’s paper, La Republique, assures its readers that the assembly is ruled by a party devoted wholly to the ecclesiastical interests; that they labor only to reduce the whole country to an abject submission to Rome, and are ready to accomplish their aims by measures fatal to the peace of France.  It asserts that the priesthood forms a league as rigorous as that over which the Guises ruled and against which the Huguenots struggled; that the church has its myriads of societies, committees, agents, an overflowing treasury, the favor of the government, a single aim—­an infallible ruler.  It calls upon the people, if they would be free, to strike down the hydra that preys upon the state.  The policy of Bismarck, indeed, finds its best defense in the condition of France.  If the interference of the papal faction proves so disastrous to the welfare of the French people, it is plainly the interest of Germany to crush it forever by all the resources of statesmanship.  If the rule of papal Rome be so intolerable to its friends, what might it not accomplish in the dominions of its opponents?  France may yet learn from its neighbors over the Rhine the only path