PENAL DISENDOWMENT IN PRUSSIA.
THE Ecclesiastical procedure of Prussia during the last three years seems to us much the most melancholy instance of national retrogression guided by administrative unscrupulousness which the present century ean show. But we should not have said this, if the-law which has just been introduced, and which will certainly be passed, to disendow without disestablishing the Roman Catholic Church in all the dioceses where the Bishops do not engage to obey the Falck laws, had been the first and only penalty provided for ignoring the eccle- siastical provisions of those laws. It seems to us evi- dently within the proper prerogative of a State to declare that it will lend no aid to any given religious teaching, unless that religious teaching seems to it conducive to political order and to the welfare of the State ; and whether that is so or not is clearly a, matter of which the State itself is the only proper or conceivable judge. Had, therefore, the Prussian statesmen avowed in 1872 that under the then existing circumstances the Roman Catholic Church was not a help, but a danger to civil order and national unity, and accordingly given that Church the choice between perfect freedom of action without State aid, or a hampered and carefully-restricted action with it, we should have held their policy quite consistent with strict justice and sound political principle. But not only was that not the line of polity adopted, but it was and is a policy bitterly ridiculed and vehemently condemned by the national,which for the most part is the anti-Romanist party. They declared and declare loudly that not only is the programme 'a Free Church in a Free State' a mistaken one, but that it is the true policy of the Government to keep every conceivable check on the action of the Church, and that, in fact, what is wanted even in relation to Protestant Churches, and most of all in relation to Roman Catholic, is a Slave Church in a Free State. They repudiate contemptuously the notion of disestablishing the Church and leaving it free, except where it may break the ordinary law, to conduct its ecclesiastical system as it chooses, and support enthusiastically Prince Bismarck and Dr. Falck in the opposite policy of legislating for the Churches in a manner adapted to clip the wings of an independent theology and an independent ecclesiastical system, without giving them any opportunity of emancipating themselves by surrendering their endowments. The Falck laws constitute an elaborate system of guarantees that no new minister shall be introduced into any church who has not been educated by teachers chosen or approved by the State, and that no priest or parochial pastor shall be pro- moted or even moved from one cure to another, without the ap- proval of the Civil Government. The effect of those laws has been to consign to prison and to load with fines a vast number of the bishops and clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, and not a few of the ministers of the higher Lutheran theology, and this, too, without giving either them or their congregations the option of recovering their ecclesiastical liberty by resigning their State pay. But even that has not been sufficient. The Pope has recently
issued a Bull, in which he declares that the Ecclesiastical laws of Prussia are inconsistent with the higher religious obligations affecting the consciences of true Catholics, and declaring, therefore, that Catholics are not required to obey them. To this the Prussian Government has rejoined by intro- ducing a Bill which empowers the Government to disendow, —but not in any sense to disestablish,—the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia wherever the ecclesiastical authorities do not promise complete obedience to the existing Prussian laws ; but it is clear that the Church so disendowed will be just as subject to the penal severities of the Falck laws as ever ; in other words, it will be burdened by all the restrictions and liable to all the heavy penalties of an Established Church,without receiving a groschen of revenue, unless the Bishops volunteer a pledge to accommodate themselves to the laws of May, 1873. Let us translate this into an equivalent enactment in relation to our own British Legislation. Suppose at the time when the Secession under Dr. Chalmers and his colleagues went out of the Estab- lished Church of Scotland, the British Legislature had passed a law which in effect declared as follows You may withdraw if you like, and of course if you do, you get not a shilling of the revenue belonging to the Scotch Church, though whenever you choose to make your submission by signing a test which binds you to obey the laws of the State, you shall have it back again ; but you must remember that your withdrawal will not leave you in any degree at liberty to govern the seceded Church as you wish. We have no intention at all of allowing you to establish any Free Church in Scotland. On the con- trary, if, when you have ceased to receive anything from the endowments of the State Church, any of your congregations attempts to appoint a new pastor without the approval of the State, or if you open a College of your own to teach the theo- logy of the Free Church without the approval of the State, you will find yourselves subjected to heavy fines and imprison- ments; indeed, the clergy of your Free Church will soon be all of them in prison, or their goods seized to pay the fines they have incurred to the State ';—suppose such a declaration authoritatively made, we say, and we suppose exactly the con- dition in which the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia will be placed after the Bill just introduced into the Prussian Landtag has become law.
In a word, the German Government is not only adopting the principle of a penal disendowment, which would be alto- gether fair if it held the character of the Church's teaching to be in direct antagonism to the political welfare of the State, but it does not leave the disendowed Church any more liberty of action than the endowed. It exercises the right acquired by virtue of a compact with the Church, after it has broken that compact. It acts like a husband who refuses to contribute a halfpenny towards his wife's support and yet insists on the right to control all her movements and to lock her up if she does not go where he chooses. Nor, apparently, if we may trust a concurrence of rumours' is even this to be the end of it.
that It is stated a test Act is also in contemplation, that Roman Catholics are not to be permitted either to become municipal officers (burgomasters) or civil servants without taking an oath • repudiating the right of the Church to interfere between them and the laws of the State. The same test must in common logic be applied to the army as well as to the service, for indeed in the army, disloyalty, if disloyalty were to be feared, would be much more dangerous. And if that policy is to be developed, the Roman Catholic Church in Prussia will first have been bound, and then stripped ; and then, lastly, in- dividual Roman Catholics will be either beset with temptations to repudiate their Church rather than lose their civic honours and military importance, or be rendered bitter and angry at heart by the insults put upon them. The whole policy is a miserable bit of vicious and retrograde legislation, and as far as we can see, without a single particle of evi- dence of that kind of disaffection which alone would have justified it. It may be true,—neither Prince Bismarck nor any of his adherents has ever attempted to prove it true, though it has been repeatedly asserted,—that the Roman Catholics of Prussia have been plotting the break-up of the Empire, and that the source of their disloyalty is at Rome. But to us it seems that more pains have been taken by the Government to foster such disloyalty than to punish it, and that the motive for this strange policy will be found in the necessity for conciliating the so-called National Liberals in some direc- tion which does not risk either the administrative autocracy of the Government or the military power of the State. But be this hypothesis true or false, it is quite certain that the steps taken to punish the assumed disloyalty of the Roman Catholics have been wanting in manliness and plain-dealing. It seems to us that a straightforward exposure, if there were any possibility. of exposure, of the disloyalty of the Roman Catho- lics, by a few typical State prosecutions, even if followed by a direct prohibition or stringent regulation of the Roman Catholic faith as such, would have been far less ignoble and far more logically defensible than the course actually pursued. No doubt there are religions,—we do not believe the Roman Catholic religion to be one,—which are in direct conflict with the objects of civilised Governments, and which, if they are not put down by the State, will ultimately put down the State with which they are at issue. Where that is so, a Church braces herself up for persecution, and the State is aware that if it does not succeed, it will be eventually vanquished by the Church which can find in the state of suffering and trial a new spring of spiritual life. But Prussia has not taken this straightforward course. She professes to leave Roman Catholics -as-free as the worshippers of any other sect, but all her new provisions are deadly blows at their ecclesiastical system, which would reduce that system, at least in its existing form, to a nullity. If the Pope has been ill advised, as no doubt he has, in making so much fuss about ecclesiastical laws the mere letter of which, as distinguished from the manner in which they are administered, would not be so intolerable, and which very likely have been so rigorously and even cruelly administered as they have been, partly because the Pope had not the wisdom to yield something in abstract principle in order to obtain a lenient administration of them in fact, yet the King of Prussia has been worse advised, at least if we judge not by the immediate result, which has been to unite an enthusiastic Voltairian party in defence of his somewhat absolutist and un- bending administration of severe Press laws and inflexible Army laws, but by the ultimate effect, which must be to promote civil discord, to raise up a deep current of disaffected feeling in the midst of his kingdom, and to feed the pride and intolerance of the great party of sceptics who hound on the Government.
Now Prussia may be, we suspect she is, strong enough to risk the civil disunion, without endangering in any degree her unity in war or the strength of her Executive in peace. But she is not above the reach of those moral and intellectual laws which bring a nemesis on popular injustice and bigotry. Here in England we have repented of our treatment of Ire- land, but we have not regained, nor shall we, for generations to come, regain, the position that we might have held there if we had always treated the Roman Catholics as we treat them now. The Prussian intolerance is even less ex- cusable than ours has been ; for ours was due to the intoler- ance of our own narrow beliefs, while theirs, for the most part —we speak, of course, of the popular feeling, and not of the statesmen—is the intolerance of the hatred of belief. It is the party of Strauss, and not the party of Luther or Calvin, which wields the popular influence in Germany. Yet a State which is once made the instrument of that kind of scientific intolerance is embarked on a course from which it is most difficult to turn aside,—a course which threatens either to extinguish all varieties of popular creed or sentiment, except those tepid ones approved by the frigid bureaucratic caste, or to engage the State in perpetual conflict with the genius of popular faiths. Either alternative would be disastrous. In- Prussia, we should fear that the former would be the more probable, and certainly it would be even more disastrous than the other.
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