d attained a
degree of power and greatness, scarcely if at all inferior to that of the
first Napoleon, and, like Napoleon, it aimed at more. It sought, like him,
to have the Church, no less than the police courts, in every respect, in
all circumstances and on all occasions, completely at its orders. This
ill-judged ambition accounts for the long list of oppressive laws which
were enacted at Berlin for the enslavement of the Catholic Church. They
are known as the "May Laws," all of them having been passed, although not
in the same year, in the month of May. Dollinger, Hohenlohe and the rest
of the anti-Catholic Bavarian _coterie_, deluded the Emperor and his
minister with the idea of an independent German _alt_, or Old Catholic
Church. They sold their country to the new empire, politically. But they
could not sell its church. One of these _alt-Catholics_, Dr. Schulte,
recommended persecution as the surest means of eradicating the ancient
church. "Let his twenty thousand florins be withdrawn from such a one, his
twelve thousand thalers from such another; let the salaries of the bishops
and chapters be suppressed, and the result will soon be manifest. The
humbler clergy will rejoice. Since 18th July, 1870, there has been neither
belief in Christ nor religious conviction among the bearers of mitres and
tonsures." Thus was the Prussian minister led to imagine that he had only
to transfer the benefices of the Catholic dignitaries to the
_alt-Catholics_ in order to constitute an independent German Church, which
would unite the whole of Germany religiously, as he had already united it
politically. All Catholics, of course, would be members of this new
Church. The State Protestantism of Prussia would, in due time, join this
State Church, and there would be, if not one Faith and one Baptism, one
Church and one State.

The calculations of Chancellor Bismarck were, however, at fault. He soon
discovered that the clergy were grossly calumniated, and that the
_alt-Catholic_ Church in which he trusted never counted more than thirty
priests; that this number increased not, and that the hundreds of
thousands of adherents of whom the pseudo bishop, Reinkens, boasted, were
only some twenty thousand to thirty thousand, scattered over all Germany.
These had no principle of cohesion. They could not agree as to any
fundamental point of religious doctrine or discipline. According to a
census made in 1876, they numbered only one hundred and thirt