heretical power, even when held in the safe keeping of the pious Emperor William and the “Christian and Evangelical” Prince Bismarck. One effect, and we think a very important one, has grown out of all this which we surmise Prince Bismarck scarcely counted upon. We believe the mass of thinking men, whatever their sympathies might have been prior to and during the late war in France, once they beheld the great German empire an accomplished fact, wished it a hearty Godspeed; for it held in its hands the intellectual, the moral, and that very important thing in these days, the physical force sufficient to regenerate Europe. We looked to it with anxiety to see whither it would tend; we looked to it with hope. Our anxieties have been realized, our hopes dashed to the ground. Prince Bismarck has alienated all Catholics and all lovers of freedom. And our eyes turn once more, all the chivalry in our natures turns, to the rising form of his late prostrate foe. We are amazed at the intense vitality of the French nation. Bismarck but “scotched the snake, not killed it; ’twill close and be itself.” All our hearts run out to it in the noble, the marvellous efforts it is making for self‐regeneration. And if France, as we now believe, will, and at no very distant date, regain the throne from which she has been hurled, the hand that hurled her thence will, by a strange fatality, have the greatest share in reinstating her. “The moral columns of the new German empire have begun to tremble as though shaken by an earthquake,” says the _Lutheran Ecclesiastical Gazette_, after deploring, as we have done, all the recent measures that have passed. As for the manner in which the Catholic Church will come out of this trial, we will let the Protestant press itself speak. We have already heard it in a half‐hearted way in England and among ourselves. The _Kreuz‐ zeitung_, the organ of the orthodox Protestants, speaks more plainly: