It was not, indeed, that Joseph II. desired to be, or to be considered un-Christian or un-Catholic. He had his own ideas of the Church of Christ, which were not the ideas of the rest of Christendom. His principle of rendering to God what belongs to God, and to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, he interpreted with a large margin in favor of Caesar, to such an extent, indeed, that the tribute to God besides being determined wholly by himself, was to be so meagre as almost to be non-existent. Following the lead of his too liberal counsellor Heinke, he distinguished, much in the manner of the Modernists of today, between what he considered essential and immutable in the Church, and what was only accessory and changeable. The former he would accept as coming from Christ, and as manifested in the primitive Church; under the latter category he classed all that might not suit his caprices, especially all that was bound up in the authority and functions of the Holy See, its supremacy, for instance, its infallibility, its temporal power, its court of Cardinals, its Curia, and all else that, according to him, were but abuses arising from the mutations of history. Hence he looked upon himself as one whose duty it was to reform the Church, at least within the extent of his own dominions, and he entered upon that work with a vigor worthy of a nobler cause. In the Church as conceived by Joseph II. everything was to be subordinate to the needs of the State. It was to be his Church, and its bishops and priests were to be his bishops, his clergy. Persuaded that he was the absolute and sole source of authority he employed all his energies in isolating his bishops, clergy and people from the centre of Catholic unity. The system of vexatious persecutions which he introduced to uphold his ideas gave to his system the name of Josephinism, a system which, but for the intervention of the French invasions, might even today have become the ruling force of Germany.