e is lost. A symptom of the
same despair is the rise of chiliastic aspirations, and the belief in
the approaching end of the world. To this party belongs the present
minister of public worship and education in Berlin. Shortly before his
appointment he wrote: "Both Church and State must perish in their
earthly forms, that the kingdom of Christ may be set up over all
nations, that the bride of the Lamb, the perfect community, the new
Jerusalem, may descend from heaven." Not long before this was published
another Prussian statesman, Bunsen, had warned his Protestant readers to
turn away from false prophets, who announce the end of the world because
they have come to the end of their own wisdom.

In the midst of this desperate weakness, although Catholics and
Protestants are so mixed up with each other that toleration must soon be
universal throughout Germany, the thoughts of the Protestants are yet
not turned towards the Catholic Church; they still show a bitter
animosity against her, and the reproach of Catholic tendencies has for
twenty years been the strongest argument against every attempt to
revive religion and worship. The attitude of Protestantism towards Rome,
says Stahl, is that of the Borghese gladiator. To soften this spirit of
animosity the only possible resource is to make it clear to all
Protestants who still hold to Christianity, what their own internal
condition is, and what they have come to by their rejection of the unity
and the authority which the Catholic Church possesses in the Holy See.
Having shown the value of the Papacy by the results which have ensued on
its rejection, Doellinger proceeds, with the same truth and impartiality,
to trace the events which have injured the influence and diminished the
glory and attractiveness of the Holy See, and have converted that which
should be the safeguard of its spiritual freedom into a calamity and a
dishonour in the eyes of mankind. It seems as though he wished to point
out, as the moral to be learnt from the present condition of the
religious world, that there is a coincidence in time and in providential
purpose between the exhaustion and the despair at which enlightened
Protestantism has arrived, from the failure of every attempt to organise
a form of church government, to save the people from infidelity, and to
reconcile theological knowledge with their religious faith,--between
this and that great drama which, by destroying the bonds which linked
the Chu