berals
of Bavaria. They assume an influence and an importance in the
ecclesiastical profession, or rather an authority, equal to that ever
asserted by the Church in its strongest days. Perhaps you will get an
idea of the height of this pretension if I translate a passage which the
liberal journal here takes from a sermon preached in the parish church
of Ebersburg, in Ober-Dorfen, by a priest, Herr Kooperator Anton
Hiring, no longer ago than August 16, 1868. It reads: "With the power
of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is
terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a
might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly
powers find their limit and end,--a might, I say, which is able to break
the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission
of heavy sin. Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes
the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally
can forgive sins. And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly
might: his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve
him. How so? When the priest approaches the altar, in order to bring
there the holy mass-offering, there, at that moment, lifts himself up
Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, upon his
throne, in order to be ready for the beck of his priests upon earth.
And scarcely does the priest begin the words of consecration, than there
Christ already hovers, surrounded by the heavenly host, come down from
heaven to earth, and to the altar of sacrifice, and changes, upon the
words of the priest, the bread and wine into his holy flesh and blood,
and permits himself then to be taken up and to lie in the hands of the
priest, even though the priest is the most sinful and the most unworthy.
Further, his power surpasses that of the highest archangels, and of the
Queen of Heaven. Right did the holy Franciscus say, 'If I should meet a
priest and an angel at the same time, I should salute the priest first,
and then the angel; because the priest is possessed of far higher might
and holiness than the angel.'"

The radical journal calls this "ultramontane blasphemy," and, the day
after quoting it, adds a charge that must be still more annoying to
the Herr Kooperator Hiring than that of blasphemy: it accuses him of
plagiarism; and, to substantiate the charge, quotes almost the very same
language from a sermon preached