Meanwhile the teachers in the State schools increased in boldness and aggressiveness. All discretion was at length thrown to the winds and doctrines irreligious and impious began to be taught openly and without reserve. The doctrines and practices of the Church were made the subject of ridicule, the name of God was omitted or referred to as a relic of superstition, morality was decried and patriotism denounced as an abuse of the Middle Ages. In 1908, when the Government saw that the parents were in earnest in demanding the observance of the school neutrality, it caused a certain Radical, M. Doumergue, Minister of Public Instruction, to introduce two bills. The first of these sought to inflict penalties upon those parents who shall prevent their children from attending classes in which books are used which are known to contain teachings abusive of religion. By the second bill the responsibility of the State is substituted for that of the teacher, who is thus removed from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and placed under the university tribunals. As soon as these bills were proposed the Bishops, in a Joint Pastoral, protested, declaring that the Bills meant nothing less than the expropriation of the family and the confiscation of its children by the State. Meanwhile the Government continued its usual aggressive policy until the parents uniting together began to demand strongly the observance of neutrality. Thereupon the Bishops, in September of last year, issued another Joint Pastoral, in which the rights of parents were set forth according to the doctrine of the Church, and in which the use of a number of class-books which dealt abusively with the teaching, practice and history of the Church, was forbidden to Catholic children. At first M. Briand sought to discountenance its importance, but when he saw from the pastorals of individual Bishops that the episcopate were in dead earnest, and from the action of pastors, parents and children, that the Bishops' instructions were likely to be carried out, he joined with the sectaries of the Bloc in denouncing what he hypocritically termed "an attack on the Republican schools." Meanwhile the teachers and the writers of the condemned books came together with prosecutions for libel against some individual Bishops who had signed and published the Joint Pastoral, and had enforced it by pronouncements of their own.