Excerpt from The Church in Politics Americans, Beware!: A Lecture Delivered Before the Independent Religious Society, Orchestra Hall, Chicago, Sunday at 11 A. M Let it be admitted that the temperament of the people, its irritability or impetuousity, is in a measure responsible for this. But this in itself is not enough to explain the terrible punishments and misfortunes which have fallen upon that nation. You are all familiar with the remark of one of her great statesmen, Gambetta: The enemy, it is clericalism. Another statesman, Paul Bert, said: It is not our domesticdiscords; it is not England; nor even the trained German legions, that constitute the greatest menace to Frenchmen and the prosperity of France, still bleeding from her wounds, but the man in black. Did these statesmen speak the truth? We shall ask history to answer the question. This much, however, we can say without consulting history, that today the French republic and the Catholic church are at swords' points. After trying to pull together, church and state have separated - are completely divorced, and each suspects and fears the other. Let us try to explain the strained relations between Rome and the French republic by a reference to the events in France from the time of the second republic to the franco-prussian war. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.