[79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated. In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller, injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally, church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Évolution religieuse_, p. 233.) Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000 inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A _procès-verbal_ was made out against him. He appeared before the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’ imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried, actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages. [Sidenote: Intellectual and moral superiority of Protestant clergy.] Finally, to the political superiority of Protestantism must be added the intellectual and moral superiority of its clergy. The obligation to read and interpret the Bible has given rise, in the universities of Protestant theology, to a work of exegesis which has resulted in a new science, the Science of Religion. The Protestant clergymen are better educated than our priests, and have moreover families and children, and lead a life like that of any other citizen; they are national, because their church is a national church; they do not receive orders from abroad, and, more than all, they do not possess the terrible power which the Catholic priest owes to the confessional; a power which cost France the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and so many other deplorable measures.[80]