AN ENGLISH VIEW OF GERMANY IN 1875.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 153, 7 April 1876, Page 15

AN ENGLISH VIEW OF GERMANY IN 1875.

I t We abridge the following article from the Berlin correspondent of the • London Daily Telegraph' : — A PROTESTANT VIEW OF THE CHURCH CONFLICT. Looking back dispassionately upon the past year, one cannot but feel that it brought little good to Germany. It was in the main an uneventful year for the Fatherland; with the exception of the warlike outburst of temper that disturbed public equanimity in April last, no political breeze of any alarming violence ruffled the tranquil surface of German affairs during the twelve months that expired last Friday night. The great home questions, with the discussion and manipulation of which 1875 opened, are pretty much where they were a year ago. In the transcendently important struggle between Church and State, the latter, being possessed of unlimited physical powers, has carried out with the utmost sternness the repressive and aggressive enactments with which an obedient Parliament had armed its iron hand ; but all its efforts to mould the Roman Church to a Prussian Government pattern have failed to overcome the stubborn, passive, patient resistance offered by the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood to the "arm of the flesh." Archbishops and Bishops have been imprisoned ; Archbishops and Bishops have gone into voluntary exile ; but no submission worth speaking of has been made by any Roman clergyman of German nationality to the hostility of that formidable impersonality, " the State," which has, in the most highly and generally educated country of the Continent, been permitted to arrogate to itself the absolute disposition not only of men's bodies, but of their consciences. It is in dealing with the immaterial part of humanity, which no prison can confine, and no penalties touch, that the most intelligent despotism of modern times has practically broken down. The inspired organs of the " State" are at great pains, in their editorial comments upon last year's achievements, to congratulate Germany upon the " sensible progress " made in coercing the Reman Church to compliance with the restrictions imposed upon it by a parliamentary majority of Lutheran laymen, and upon the " e\ ident disposition of the subordinate Roman clergy to welcome the new State laws, as emancipating them from an insufferable hierarchical tyranny." Were these semi-official felicitations founded on an appreciable array of good solid facts, it might, perhaps, be well for the domestic peace of Germany ,• but the foreign resident here, however carefully he watch the course of contemporary events and examine the evidence brought forward by the acolytes of the " State" cultus in favor of their assertions, cannot honestly come to the conclusion that any disposition to espouse the State view in matters ecclesiastical has been as yet evinced by the Roman Catholic working priesthood. It may be that the official writers are in possession of information justifying their asseverations. Nothing is more difficult, in this country, than to get at facts respecting the real effect produced by the application of laws passed at the instance of the Government — that is, if the person desiring to obtain such information happen to be free from any sort of connection with the Press-Bureau, and to keep aloof from the influences so intelligently exercised upon journalists of all varieties, home and foreign, in Prussia. The newspaper chroniclers are often careless — almost incredibly so — and still more frequently so strongly impregnated with partisanship as to be manifestly untrustworthy.