cond Empire, it allies
itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination,
and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man.
In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other
secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century,
work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up,
seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being;
he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember
the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every
independent character and on every free intellect.--At another time, as
under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a
rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we
of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily,
for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is
most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free
citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray
and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and
schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the
school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what
discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at
what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening
of taxation already too great.

IV. Contrasting Vistas.

Other difficulties of the French system.--New and scientific
conception of the world.--How opposed to the Catholic
conception.--How it is propagated.--How the other is
defended.--Losses and gains of the Catholic Church.--Its
narrow and broad domains.--Effects of Catholic and French
systems on Christian sentiment in France.--Increased among
the clergy and diminished in society.

Other disadvantages of the French system are still worse.--In (the
nineteenth) century, an extraordinary event occurs. Already about
the middle of the preceding century, the discoveries of scientists,
coordinated by the philosophers, had afforded the sketch in full of
a great picture, still in course of execution and advancing towards
completion, a picture of the physical and moral universe. In this sketch
the point of sight was fixed, the perspective designed, the various
distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were
so correct tha