The decisive step was now taken, and Doellinger in separating himself from the Catholic body was welcomed by the enthusiastic acclamations of all the liberal camp. Dreaming that he was about to play the role of a new Luther, the apostate gathered about him the disaffected elements of German Catholicism, especially in the various universities of the country. Men who held high prestige in the scientific and literary world, threw themselves at his feet and called him the savior of Germany. Forty-four professors in the University of Munich, a stronghold of Rationalism ever since 1848, and among them Freiderich Sepp and Reischl, were foremost among the defenders. Theologians like Hilgers, Langen, Reusch, and Knoodt from the University of Bonn; Reinkens, Baltzer and Weber, from Breslau; Michelis, from Braunsberg, and Schulte from Prague were but the leaders in the list of eminent savants who placed themselves under his rebel banner. The heart of Doellinger was inflated with pride and in laying the foundations of that sect to which the euphonious title of "The Old Catholics" was given, the apostate imagined that a new Reformation was beginning, which would presently count its supporters by the thousands and millions. History, with pitiless irony, has told the sad fate of his ambitions. Despite the immense aid given by the State to the new religion, despite the prestige even of Doellinger and his savants, the Old Catholics degenerated in a few years into a squabbling, disunited mob, to such an extent that Doellinger himself became ashamed of the child of his fancy. Too proud to acknowledge publicly the error which his heart recognized, he continued his apostasy until his death, by apoplexy, January 10, 1890. Hermes, Günther, Frohschammer and Doellinger were but the manifestations of that spirit of disorder among the German Catholics, whose purpose was primarily to reconcile, by their own methods, the spirit of faith with the spirit of the age. Pride had created blindness, and blindness, spiritual suicide. But the liberal world that looked on placed their mutilated carcasses upon the altars of hate, and made their fall the occasion of fiery denunciations against the Church and all that it represented. _PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY._