the French occupation, and might be left to the enlightened
judgment of Catholics.

It was proposed that the fund realised by the sale of the real property
of the religious corporations should be administered for religious
purposes by local boards of trustees representing the Catholic
population, and that the State should abdicate in their favour its
ecclesiastical patronage, and proceed to discharge the unsettled claims
of the clergy. So great a change in the plans by which Sella and
Rattazzi had impoverished the Church in 1866 and 1867 would, if frankly
carried into execution, have encouraged an independent spirit among the
Italian bishops; and the reports of the prefects represented about
thirty of them as being favourable to conciliation. But the Ministry
fell in November, and was succeeded by an administration whose leading
members, Lanza and Sella, were enemies of religion. The Court of Rome
was relieved from a serious peril.

The only European country whose influence was felt in the attitude of
its bishops was one whose government sent out no diplomatists. While the
Austrian Chancellor regarded the issue of the Council with a profane and
supercilious eye, and so much indifference prevailed at Vienna that it
was said that the ambassador at Rome did not read the decrees, and that
Count Beust did not read his despatches, the Catholic statesmen in
Hungary were intent on effecting a revolution in the Church. The system
which was about to culminate in the proclamation of infallibility, and
which tended to absorb all power from the circumference into the centre,
and to substitute authority for autonomy, had begun at the lower
extremities of the hierarchical scale. The laity, which once had its
share in the administration of Church property and in the deliberations
of the clergy, had been gradually compelled to give up its rights to the
priesthood, the priests to the bishops, and the bishops to the Pope.
Hungary undertook to redress the process, and to correct centralised
absolutism by self-government. In a memorandum drawn up in April 1848,
the bishops imputed the decay of religion to the exclusion of the people
from the management of all Church affairs, and proposed that whatever is
not purely spiritual should be conducted by mixed boards, including lay
representatives elected by the congregations. The war of the revolution
and the reaction checked this design; and the Concordat threw things
more than ever into cleric