, and our rules
will keep us,' and I think there can be no doubt that the French
freemasons, and the fanatics of unbelief generally who have launched the
government of the Third Republic upon its present course, will find this
new Christian organisation of Capital and Labour a troublesome factor in
the political field.

We have seen what came in Germany of the _Cultur-Kampf_, and there are
curious analogies between the work and the spirit of the Catholic Clubs
in France to-day, and the ideas of Monseigneur von Ketteler, which gave
vigour and vitality to the great 'party of the Centre,' in the contest
with the Chancellor. Where the giant of Berlin had the wisdom to give
way, the pigmies of Paris are likely to persist until they are crushed.
For they have burned their ships, as the Chancellor never burned his,
and they are dogmatists, while he is a statesman. He sought to control
and use the Catholic Church in Germany. Their object is, as one of the
ablest Republicans in France, Jules Simon, long ago told them, to
supplant a State Church of belief by a State church of unbelief. In
America and in England when men talk of 'religious freedom,' they mean
the freedom of a man to profess and practise his own religion. What the
Third French Republic means by 'religious freedom' is freedom from
religion. Their legislation has tended, ever since 1877, not indirectly
nor by implication, but directly and avowedly, to establish in France a
state of things in which, not Catholics only, but all men who profess
any form of religion, shall be treated as Protestants were in France
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or as Catholics were in
Ireland under William III. This is the meaning of M. Gambetta's war-cry
'Clericalism is the enemy.' The phrase was his, but the policy was
announced by his party long before he invented the phrase in 1877. It
was distinctly formulated in 1874 by a Republican leader much better
equipped for dealing with such questions than M. Gambetta, who was the
Boanerges not the Paul of the French gospel of unbelief.

On September 4, 1874, M. Challemel-Lacour, in a remarkable speech, laid
it down as a fundamental principle of the Republican policy that the
State should so control all the higher branches of education as to
secure what he called 'the moral unity of France.' It was on this
principle that Napoleon in 1808 had re-organised the University of
France. M. Challemel-Lacour unhesitatingly called upon t