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 IN GERMANY 351

of the State. It needs energetic leadership by its supreme instance, not in secular matters but so much the more in ecclesiastical matters. The medieval grant to the Church of power transcending the power of the State had been abrogated. "One must carefully distinguish be- tween the immovable, unshakable element in the Papacy from the movable element in the Papacy," said Moehlen "The first will last as long as the Church lasts; the second takes on form according as the needs and circumstances of the time require."

This point of view did not prevail in Germany. Though it was temperate it clashed with rigid conceptions of the Church as an es- tablished institution which had grown popular since the Emperor Joseph's time. When Ultramontane thought, which had evolved curiously enough in the land of Gallicanism, began to exert an influ- ence across the Rhine, it throve most mightily in the well policed Ger- man states. The "Cologne incident," was a storm which broke our in Prussia and elsewhere after threatening clouds had overshadowed the eighteenth century. In this struggle over what was to be the religion of children born in mixed marriage, the victory went to a Church which had developed an organic independence not to be curbed either by culture or the state. The firmness of the Arch- bishops of Cologne and Posen, who went to prison for having obeyed the Papal Brief of 1830, impelled the Catholics of Germany to rally their forces anew. Goeraes now hurled his indictments against Prus- sia. The excesses committed by the omnipotent State were so fan- tastic that the Church was enabled to regain self-confidence. The Papacy which had exhorted the bishops to stand firm against the gov- ernment came to seem a custodian of liberty. The new theories of ecclesiastical monarchism passed from books to men and were soon transformed into life, conviction and passionate feeling. When Fred- erick William IV, the "romantic King," had freed the prelates from arrest and had restored peace with the Curia by making generous con- cessions, the principle of an autonomous Church closely affiliated with the Pope and the Papacy also became an issue in Austria, the rest ot Germany and Switzerland.

In other countries of Europe the new Roman idea also made similar headway against the hostile front of revolutionary liberalism and State

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