"I am sure that the Pope will not make any choice in a spirit reprisal, but that he will consider purely religious interests only. What consideration ought he to have for you, when you have had none for him? He will make choices that can embarrass you, against whom you will protest. Oh! I know you always have a resource at hand after you have made a bad law; you can make another which will be a law of despotism and perhaps of tyranny. That is always the poor resource of short-sighted assemblies. I would prefer to provide for the danger rather than be obliged to remedy it by such means. I am sure that a mutual understanding is desirable, that it is necessary. I wish you could see it, and that if you are determined to proceed resolutely towards separation, you will do it with that prudence, that method which I have indicated, and which is the only one that can save you from danger." M. Ribot proceeds to point out the danger of "repulsing the Holy See with a violent, almost brutal gesture and of permitting political associations to enslave the clergy after they have been emancipated from the State." "Gentlemen, you want to be logical, but you are the most short-sighted of statesmen. You justify in advance all acts of inquietude. My friend, M. Lanessan, who is a devoted partisan of the separation of Church and State, published, the day before yesterday, in the _Siecle_ a letter from a member of the clergy, whom he calls a liberal and republican priest, who does not care to see politics mixed with religion; and that priest declared that the separation, such as you wish to make it, without method, without transition, and without an understanding with the Holy See, must have for its result a considerable increase in the action of the Papacy and the Roman congregations over the French clergy, and that the French clergy will not submit, even in spite of itself, to a domination which drags it between the militant parties of political action."