The third recent circumstance to be mentioned is the confidential mission of Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers, to Paris. I have spoken of this man before as Bishop of Nancy, and forgot to add that he had been translated to Algiers. He is to persuade the Emperor and the ministers Ollivier and Daru to make no opposition to the passing of the Infallibilist dogma, and to offer in return that the articles of the Syllabus on Church and State shall be either dropped, or modified in their application to France. He of course asserts that he has no mission of the kind, and is only going to Paris about an educational question, just as Cardinal Mathieu professed to have only gone to France to hold an ordination.(39) In Paris the strangeness of the situation is remarked on, that the very State which used always most vigorously to assert its independence against the domineering pretensions of the Pope is now suffering, not only the infallibility but the supreme dominion of the Pope, and his right of interference in its political affairs, to be decreed under cover of its bayonets. And in Rome it is understood that, if the French troops were suddenly to disappear during the rejoicings and illuminations following on the Infallibilist triumph, the situation might become very uncomfortable. It is therefore thought that a couple of articles of the Syllabus might the more easily be surrendered, as the shield of Infallibility would cover the whole Syllabus, and no one could hinder an infallible Pope from taking the first opportunity, in spite of all secret promises, of again utilizing the principle now made into a dogma. The Roman clerics, whether high or low, are unable to comprehend that not only the German but the Latin nations feel so decided an antipathy to the domination of the priesthood over civil and social life, and on that account only must resist the Infallibilist theory, because it involves the doctrine that the Pope is to encroach on the secular and political domain with commands and punishments, the moment he can do so without too great prejudice to his office and fear of humiliation. It seems so natural and obvious to a Roman Monsignore or Abbate that the chief priest should rule also over monarchs and nations in worldly matters; from youth up he has seen clergymen acting as police-officers, criminal judges, and lottery collectors, and has no other experience than of the parish priest, the Bishop, and the Inquisition, interfering in the innermost concerns of family life, and the “paternal government” often taking the shape of a strait-waistcoat; he lives in a world where the confusion of the two powers is incarnated in every college, congregation, and administrative office. Nowhere but in Rome would it have been possible for Leo XII., with universal consent of all the clergy, high and low, to re-introduce the Latin language into the law courts after it had been abolished under the French occupation.