imperial family, is no matter of hypocrisy; they are sincere and good Catholics, and whenever their religious sentiments are not accompanied by natural talent and judgement, necessarily bigoted. The influence which the priests, who possess their confidence, may exercise upon the emperor, is therefore immense, when they address in the emperor the private individual; but if they approach him in his official quality, they must show deference and obedience like all the rest; because the emperor, in his official quality, knows only subjects and no superiors. A few instances will put their position in the true light.

The Archduke Charles, the celebrated general, was married to a Protestant princess; she died, and was to be buried in the imperial family-vault at the Capuchins. The Capuchins raised objections to bury a heretic within the precincts of their monastery, and sent a deputation to the Emperor Francis he had scarcely listened to their first words, when he turned quickly round upon them, and said to them in the idiom of Vienna, "Mochts mi nit wild or I hebs euch olli auf;"--"Don't put me in a rage, or I'll abolish you altogether." In 1817, when the third jubilee anniversary of the reformation returned, the Emperor Francis not only allowed his Protestant subjects to celebrate it, but ordered that the day should be celebrated by all his subjects, without distinction of religion, as a general national festival devoted to toleration and to the commemoration of the edict by which Joseph II. secured that great blessing to all his Christian subjects and thus, while the Protestant churches rung with the lofty anthem of Luther, "Ain fester burg ist unser Gott," the emperor's chaplain pronounced, in the emperor's own chapel, a sermon on the subject of Christian toleration before a Catholic auditory, amongst whom was the emperor himself. The present emperor, perhaps, is less enlightened than his father was; and the empress is undoubtedly greatly under the influence of the Ligurians, a kind of reformed Jesuits. Ziegler, bishop of Linz, a very bigoted and intolerant man, is a great favourite with both yet the following fact happened about two years ago. The Protestants at Linz wished to build a church, and the bishop opposed them with all his might. The Protestants addressed a complaint to the civil governor

of Linz, Prince Kinski, who immediately ordered the bishop to desist from his opposition. The bishop then addressed himself to the emperor, who severely reprimanded him, and approved the conduct of Prince Kinski. The Protestants have their church.

The position of the Catholic church vis à vis of the government, cannot be stronger characterized than by the words of the Emperor Francis: "I'll abolish you." Joseph II. abolished and secularized most of the monasteries, Francis restored them; but the action of Joseph still subsists as a precedent; and if the church endeavours to play the master, it is simply told, "Remember what happened to you under Joseph;-if you show the least resistance to the government, you shall cease to exist."

The Catholic church, undoubtedly, is considered by government as one of the principal pillars of the state; but the priests must be satisfied to act as subjects-as prime functionaries, certainly, but still as subjects. The Catholic church is in no country more effectually under the restraint of government than in Austria; it is indeed a political engine which the rulers may employ as they think advisable. This essential point once settled, the use to which Prince Metternich puts the Catholic church in Germany will become easy to be understood.

The influence which the house of Austria exercised over

Germany was completely annihilated by Frederic II. of Prussia: until that moment, it had always been used for the suppression of intellectual and political freedom. It was during this temporary emancipation from Austria that German literature made such rapid strides; that the country which, at the accession of Frederic (1740), had scarcely emerged from the barbarism which was entailed upon it by the devastations of the thirty years' war, was, at the moment of his death (1786), the equal of any other European nation in literature, arts, sciences, and general enlightenment. The progress was so rapid, so striking, that it even affected the stationary Austria, and decided Joseph II. to say also there, "Let there be light." The reign of Joseph, however, was too short; after him all progress was again stopped. But Germany, under Napoleon, shook off all connexion with Austria,

and still advanced, while Austria did not make a single step. A national Catholic church was organized under the direction of Prince Dalberg, as we have said before, one of the most enlightened men of his age; and, strange enough for a Pope, Grand Master of the order of the Illuminati, a secret society, who did honour to their name by the propagation of light amongst the people, and by forwarding public instruction to a very extensive degree*.

* As the subject is little known here, and also connected with the state of religion in Germany during that period, we subjoin some details respecting the Illuminati. They originated from the Freemasons. The Freemasons, in the time of Frederic the Great, were insignificant, and Frederic, who belonged to the order, showed only indifference to them; at the end of his reign, and almost simultaneously with the abolition of the Jesuits (1773), the order rose into greater activity, but not into a very laudable one. The belief in magic and alchymy was propagated by secret societies, and the conversions to Catholicism multiplied in a strange degree. These endeavours, after the death of Frederic, found encou ragement in his successor, Frederic William, (1786-1797,) who allowed himself to be entirely led by Bischoffswerther, who could raise ghosts, and put the king into constant communication not only with them, but more material subjects from the living female world. Amongst the many assistants he employed we need only mention one, who will give an idea of the others, Sigismund Oswald, who wrote several books (Analogy between Corporeal and Spiritual Births; Hours of Secret Intercourse with God, &c.) to reveal to the world what Jesus Christ, who often appeared to him during his solitary walks, had said to him on those occasions. Such was the class of men which entirely governed Prussia under Frederic William II. This baneful direction of the times inspired Schiller with the idea of his Geisterseher, which, in form of a novel, relates the conversion of a prince of Würtemburg by the Jesuits-and was counteracted in a more general manner by Goethe in his Faust, in which the magical and mystical propensities of the times were enrolled as soldiers to fight a battle between Kant's Verstand (intelligenceMephistopheles) and Vernunft (reason-Faust). The generals whom Goethe thus employed ruined the army: in other words, Goethe seized his times by their diseased mysticism, and threw them over into the healthy field of speculation and philosophy, where the ghosts lost all body and soon vanished into an unsubstantial phantasmagoria, through which the light broke in full streams. The more special connexion between these propensities and the secret societies was exposed by Nicolai and Biester at Berlin; they openly accused the secret societies with being the seats of the mischief, and mere instruments in the hands of the Jesuits for the overthrow of Protestantism. The principal champions who came forth against them in favor of the secret societies, were, strange to say, the Jesuit Sailer, who is now an archbishop under the present king of Bavaria, and another Bavarian Catholic priest, Stattler of Munich. The fact itself allows of no doubt. How far Freemasonry was made a handle of by Jesuitism is not known; but that it seconded this baneful direction is beyond doubt; and even those who did not plainly accuse the Freemasons of Jesuitism, at least asserted the dangerous direction of Freemasonry at that period.

The accusation was acknowledged as not unfounded by the order itself, in as far as those of its members who really desired the propagation of light, seceded and went over to the Illuminati founded by Weisshaupt in Bavaria. The Illuminati exercised a most extensive and beneficial influence upon Germany, and their last grand-master was Prince Dalberg, the national pope of the German Catholic church during the time of Napoleon. A great many Catholic priests were Illuminati; and it was during this very period, that Catholic priests took the most conspicuous part in the spread and perfection of popular instruction; Brunner,

When, in 1815, the previously separated parts, Austria, Prussia, and the Rhenish Confederation, reunited in the present Germanic Confederation, the relative position of Austria to the rest was very disadvantageous. During nearly seventyfive years of uninterrupted progress, Germany had become an uncommonly enlightened country, while Austria was almost what it had been a hundred years back. The influence of the Pope was so completely gone in Germany, that the Catholic priests themselves saw much disadvantage in a new connexion with the Romish see. Both Austria and the Pope were very willing to reconquer their ancient supremacy,—but how to effect it? Political freedom, public discussion, the press, and all institutions promoting progress were gradually undermined; and the battle was finally decided in favour of Austria, by the ordinances of the Diet of 1832 and the following years. Since that moment we have, in the whole of Germany, the most complete reaction. In Austria there was nothing to stop, and therefore, from the very non-existence of reaction, Austria, at this moment, is the only country of the Germanic Confederation in which there is an appearance of progress. To stop any advance, to separate the princes from their subjects, and to rouse the latter against the first by bad government, such was the policy Prince Metternich followed from the beginning, and which he has succeeded fully in establishing since 1832. And why has he done this? To reconquer Germany for the house of Austria, to re-establish the old German empire under the supremacy of Austria. The princes of Germany are now almost in the same predicament as the sovereign princes of Italy: some years more of reaction, and the emperor is the political master of Germany, and his country is at the head of German civilization;-for Prince Metternich shows now the same anxiety to forward progress and good government at home, as to thwart it in the German States. This may be said of Germany in general.

If we look to the single states, we must admit, that most of the princes were so weak in themselves, and placed at the head

Amongst the

Schmidt, Werkmeister, Demeter, and many others, are instances. Illuminati a new schism afterwards took place between those friendly to Napoleon and those hostile to him. On the ruins of Illuminatism the Tugenbund arose, whose principal aim was the overthrow of Napoleon.

of such small countries, that Austria might at once have established an uncontested political supremacy over them, by the mere weight of her material power, if there had not been two opposing elements in Germany-namely Prussia and Bavaria. These were comparatively strong states, and being equally jealous of their independence and sovereignty, it is clear that in case of any open attempt of Austria to place one smaller prince in a more apparent state of subjection, all the smaller princes would have found natural leaders in Bavaria and Prussia; they all had a common cause, viz. to protect their independence against the encroachments of Austria,—and the strife between Austria on one side, and the whole of Germany on the other, would scarcely have turned to the advantage of the former: Prussia and Bavaria, then, were the only obstacles Austria had to put out of the way, in order to gain the uncontested supremacy of Germany.

And it was precisely against these two important rivals, Bavaria and Prussia, that Austria sent the pope. Prince Metternich needed not to put on a frowning brow, which would have ill-beseemed the occasion; he smiled like the Tempter, when he presented the apple to our great-grandmother Eve, and said, "Take my boon and eritis sicut deus." The good which they were to know he could easily make them understand. Times were bad-the princes, when they required assistance from their subjects against Napoleon, did not obtain it by an angry nod as heretofore, by stretching forth their arms in command, or by lifting their feet for a gentle kick: the king of Prussia had been obliged to fold his hands devoutly before his subjects, to pray them, nay to bribe them with an oral promise of a constitution, and to put his promise down in black and white upon the parchment of a royal edict, before His Majesty's subjects would submit to have their necks and bones broken by the enemy of their king. This was already bad enoughbut what followed was still worse; when the battle was over, all the warriors came home with red caps on their heads, and even the peaceful citizens who had stayed at home were so pleased with the sight, that they threw off their white woollen nightcaps and exchanged them for the new revived headdress of Phrygia. Times were bad, as we have said; and so Prince Metternich told the kings of Prussia and Bavaria :