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THE

DUBLIN REVIEW.

JANUARY, 1875.

ART. I.-PRUSSIAN LAW AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

The New Prussian Bills. By EMMANUEL BARON V. KETTELER, Bishop of Mainz. London: Burns & Oates. 1874.

Friedberg's German Empire and the Catholic Church. Leipzig, 1873. Italia, No. 1. Hillebrand. Leipzig: Hartung. London: Williams & Norgate. 1874.

THE progress of the struggle with governments through which the Church is passing at the present moment probably presents no new features whatever. The records of the past, scanty and untrustworthy if you will, still suffice to convince us, if we have any eye to frame for ourselves what has been, rather vaguely but still intelligibly, called a philosophy of history, that the factors in such a struggle being always the same, the outcome must also be similar. Ever since Christianity came into the world and taught men at large that which the princes of thought alone had before recognized, -the existence and the inviolable sacredness of souls and of consciences, that sword which the Incarnate Wisdom of God came to send upon earth has never been sheathed and never will be. We know not whether we are expressing a merely personal experience, or, on the other hand, giving vent to a truth of such common acceptance as to be worthy only of the name of truism, when we say, that when life began, one read and heard and even talked of the continual war within each human being of which the Apostle speaks, in an unreal way. Temptation, sin, grace, truth, principle, suffering for justice' sake, the Church and its aims, the world and its deceits, all were more or less but names; we held them and their characteristics as true, but as general and speculative truth; we had little experience of them in the concrete, or in the particular; the battle of life was before us as in a picture, a painted fire whose potency was as yet unknown. Analogously in the great struggle of Divine truth to hold its own on this inVOL. XXIV.-NO. XLVII. [New Series.]

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