The party in Europe who desired the suppression of the Pope’s temporal rule professed to be actuated by zeal for promoting a more free and useful exercise of his spiritual authority. It soon became manifest that this was the merest sham. Switzerland, guided by that narrow kind of Protestantism which has so often asserted its power, pretended to see only in the Pope the Chief of the small Roman State; when deprived of that State, he was no longer a prince or dignitary, with whom diplomatic relations could be held. His legate at Berne, accordingly, was informed that he must take his departure from the territory of the Swiss Confederation. It is well understood that this ungracious measure was secretly advised and promoted by Germany. That Power speedily followed the example, although not at first in a very direct or open way. The German ministry appointed to the Embassy of the Vatican Cardinal Hohenlohe, the only one of the cardinals who proved unfaithful to Pius IX. in the hour of his great distress. The Pope remonstrated against the appointment. The inflexible Prussian minister, Bismarck, replied that he would send no other, suspended and finally abolished diplomatic relations between the new Empire and the Holy See. It is by no means matter for surprise that a man of Prince Bismarck’s views and character should have so acted, or even that he should have become the promoter of the greatest and most unwarrantable persecution by which any nation has been disgraced, or to which any portion of the Church has been subjected in modern times. This minister, who may be truly described as the political scourge of Germany, is as fanatical in religion as he is coarse and sceptical in politics. He abandoned his party, and became, or feigned to become, a liberal in order to gratify his hatred of the Catholic Church. He belongs to that branch of Protestantism which is called “orthodox” (_lucus a non lucendo_). On occasion of the debate, 14th April, 1874, on the law which withdrew the salaries of the Catholic clergy, a Protestant conservative member of the representative body, Count de Malrahn, declared that he would vote for this law, because it would affect only the Catholics, without interfering with the rights of the Evangelical denomination. Bismarck, by his reply, not only showed an utter absence of all political faith, but at the same time a degree of political hypocrisy with which all true history will never cease to stigmatize him. “I must express the great joy which I experience on hearing the declaration of the preceding speaker. If, at the commencement of the religious conflict, the conservatives had taken this ground, and sustained the government in the name of the Evangelical religion, I never would have been under the necessity of separating from the Conservative party.”