Even in our own country, it may be remarked that the general sympathy is with anti-Christian--especially anti-papal insurrections and revolutions. We should witness little sympathy with the Cretans and Christians of the Turkish empire, if they were not understood to be schismatics, who reject the authority of the pope in spirituals as well as in temporals. Yet, prior to the treaty of Paris in 1856, the Greek prelates were, under the Turkish sovereignty, the temporal lords of their people, and the design of that treaty, so far as relates to the Eastern Christians, was to deprive them of the last remains of temporal independence, and to complete the conquest of Mahomet II. The complete subjection of religion to the state is called religious liberty, the emancipation of conscience. {7} Our American press applauds the Italian ministry for laying down the law for the Italian bishops, restored their sees, from which the state exiled them, and prescribing them their bounds, beyond which they must not pass. The Italian State does not, as with us, recognize the freedom and independence of the Spiritual order, but at best only tolerates it. It asserts not only the freedom and independence of the state in face of the church, but its supremacy, its right to govern the church, or at least to define the limits within which it may exist and operate. This is what our age understands by the separation of church and state. If it foregoes, at any time or place, the authority to govern the church, it still holds that it has the right to govern churchmen the same as any other class of persons; that the civil law is the supreme law of the land; and that religion, when it happens to conflict with it, must give way to it. The law of the state is the supreme law. This is everywhere the doctrine of European liberals, and the doctrine they reduce to practice wherever they have the power, and hence the reason why the church visits them with her censures. Many devout believers think the separation of church and state must mean this, and can mean nothing else, and therefore that the union of church and state must mean a return to the old mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government of the middle ages. Hence a Donoso Cortes and a Baron Ricasoli are on this point in singular accord. Our American press, which takes its cue principally from European liberals, takes the same view, and understands both the separation and the union of church and state in the same sense.