The point, that essentially differentiates associations for public worship in Prussia and elsewhere from those of the law of 1905, is that, in the former, the Catholic hierarchy was respected. In them the curate is by right president, episcopal authority is paramount, and the State cannot intervene if dissensions arise. Now Articles 8, 9, etc., of the French law are the very antipodes of all this.[22] The fact is that there can be no real accord between the Church and the French atheocracy, whose openly avowed object is the radical destruction of the religious idea, even of natural religion. Never perhaps, in the history of humanity, has there been such a monstrosity as a distinctly atheistic state. Pagan antiquity, even the Grecian Republics, had a cult of some kind. The First Republic, under Robespierre, having decreed the abolition of Christianity, immediately substituted theo-philanthropy. But the Third Republic proclaims itself atheist, and insists that the nation shall be made atheist by means of public schools. Hitherto the words lay, layman, meant in French as in English, simply, not of the clergy; to-day, _laïque_ in France means atheist. _L’école laïque_ means, not a school taught by laymen, but a school of infidelity. Catholic lay or secular schools are still holding their own against the state schools, which are nearly empty in some communes. Not satisfied with having suppressed twenty-seven thousand religious or congregational schools, the annual September convent of the Grand Orient has decided that all these Christian lay schools, primary and secondary, must disappear. It also finds that the State _lycées de filles_ “are not sufficiently laicized,” meaning of course not sufficiently atheized and depraved. Yet the work seems to be well under way, if we are to judge by the following extracts from the discourse pronounced on the grave of a child of twelve by one of her companions of an _école laïque_ near Allevard, in presence of the whole school. “For thee infinite nothingness has begun, as it will begin for all of us. Thy death, or rather the supposed Being who caused it, must be very wicked or very stupid.... He made thee the victim of a society refractory to society solidarity.... We really cannot excuse this celestial iniquity.” I transcribe from the anti-clerical _Dépêche Dauphinoise_. The spectacle of this free-thought funeral, and of a little schoolgirl blaspheming over the grave of a playmate, is simply hideous. Poor hapless victims of a pagan state, that nevertheless enlists the sympathies of Christians who spend millions on missions to the heathen Chinese! This Masonic convent has also decided “that the means of production and exchange must be restituted to the collectivity.” Therefore we know in advance what the new Chambers will accomplish: State monopoly of instruction, and State Socialism prepared and accomplished as rapidly as possible.