The pretensions of the ultramontane clergy are, indeed, remarkable enough to attract the attention of others besides the liberals of Bavaria.  They assume an influence and an importance in the ecclesiastical profession, or rather an authority, equal to that ever asserted by the Church in its strongest days.  Perhaps you will get an idea of the height of this pretension if I translate a passage which the liberal journal here takes from a sermon preached in the parish church of Ebersburg, in Ober-Dorfen, by a priest, Herr Kooperator Anton Hiring, no longer ago than August 16, 1868.  It reads:  “With the power of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly powers find their limit and end,—­a might, I say, which is able to break the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission of heavy sin.  Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally can forgive sins.  And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly might:  his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve him.  How so?  When the priest approaches the altar, in order to bring there the holy mass-offering, there, at that moment, lifts himself up Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, upon his throne, in order to be ready for the beck of his priests upon earth.  And scarcely does the priest begin the words of consecration, than there Christ already hovers, surrounded by the heavenly host, come down from heaven to earth, and to the altar of sacrifice, and changes, upon the words of the priest, the bread and wine into his holy flesh and blood, and permits himself then to be taken up and to lie in the hands of the priest, even though the priest is the most sinful and the most unworthy.  Further, his power surpasses that of the highest archangels, and of the Queen of Heaven.  Right did the holy Franciscus say, ’If I should meet a priest and an angel at the same time, I should salute the priest first, and then the angel; because the priest is possessed of far higher might and holiness than the angel.’”

The radical journal calls this “ultramontane blasphemy,” and, the day after quoting it, adds a charge that must be still more annoying to the Herr Kooperator Hiring than that of blasphemy:  it accuses him of plagiarism; and, to substantiate the charge, quotes almost the very same language from a sermon preached in 1785—­In this it is boldly claimed that “in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, there is nothing mightier than a priest, except God; and, to be exact, God himself must obey the priest in the mass.”  And then, in words which I do not care to translate, the priest is made greater than the Virgin Mary, because Christ was only born of the Virgin once, while the priest “with five words, as often and wherever he will,” can “bring forth the Saviour of the world.”  So to-day keeps firm hold of the traditions of a hundred years ago, and ultramontanism wisely defends the last citadel where the Middle Age superstition makes a stand,—­the popular veneration for the clergy.