The Archbishop of Aix has been condemned by the French
Council of State for using the churches as places in which to excite agitation against the Government,—that is, for ordering a pastoral attacking the Education Bill to be read in all the churches, contrary to the Concordat and an article of the Penal Code. Pastorals read in the churches should by that article be confined exclusively to subjects of religious instruc- tion, and if they be directed against the Government, the prelate who issues the pastoral is liable to punishment. If the further charge against the Archbishop be true, that he had declared the Ministers to be " lions who have fallen on the Church to devour it, and have for three months been eating greedily, but being incapable of digesting it, they will burst from indigestion, like pigs, and the Church, more powerful than ever, will resume in Governmental regions its due place of honour," the Archbishop will be really cited. in person before the Council of State, and will probably be punished with a short imprisonment. The French Government are quite right to prosecute Archbishops for such language, if they prosecute priests, politicians, or private persons ; but would it not be better not to prosecute anybody for such virulence P However, the most curious proposal is that of M. Lockroy, to remedy this kind of language by the separation of Church and State. Would a disestablished and disendowed Archbishop of Aix be in any awe whatever of the French Government ? Would not his language be in all probability regulated much more by its aptitude for bringing in enthusiastic contributions from private Catholics, than by its pleasingness or unpleasingness to an Administration to which he would owe nothing, and from which he would fear little.
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