tormenting importunings, she was deposed from office and driven from the scene of her labours, and when, soon thereafter, in 1872, she died, the habit of her order was stripped from her body. The Old Catholics of Bonn, whose proceedings she had not countenanced, charged themselves with securing for her a Christian burial.--No state as such has recognised the council. Austria answered it by abolishing the concordat and forbidding the proclamation of the decrees. Bavaria and Saxony refused their _placet_; Hesse, Baden, and Württemberg declared that the conclusions of the council had not binding authority in law. Prussia indeed held to its principle of not interfering in the internal affairs of the Catholic church, but, partly for itself, partly as the leading power of the new German empire, passed a series of laws in order to resume its too readily abandoned rights of sovereignty over the affairs of the Catholic church, and to insure itself against further encroachments of ultramontanism upon the domain of civil life (§ 197). The Romance states, on the other hand, pre-eminently France, were prevented by internal troubles and conflicts from taking any very decisive steps. § 190. THE OLD CATHOLICS. A most promising reaction, mainly in Germany, led by men highly respected and eminent for their learning, set in against the Vatican Council and its decrees, in the so-called Old Catholic movement of the liberal circles of the Catholic people, which went the length, even in 1873, of establishing an independent and well organized episcopal church. Since then, indeed, it has fallen far short of the all too sanguine hopes and expectations at first entertained; but still within narrower limits it continues steadily to spread and to rear for itself a solid structure, while carefully, even nervously, shrinking from anything revolutionary. More in touch with the demands of the _Zeitgeist_ in its reformatory concessions, yet holding firmly in every particular to the positive doctrines of orthodoxy, the Old Catholic movement has made progress in Switzerland, while in other Catholic countries its success has been relatively small.