24 APRIL 1875, Page 2

Prince Bismarck certainly is not an accurate speaker. He de-

clared in the debate of April 16th, on the revision of the Prussian Charter, that the Pope "hands over heretics, including the great majority of the Prussians, to eternal perdition, and orders us to accept the Romanist religion as we would value the future salvation of our souls." We have never heard of any fulmination of the kind. On the contrary, silly and arbitrary as the present Pope is, it is he who has given the final Papal sanction to the dictum that pious heretics who are in "invincible ignorance" of Catholic truth, may be saved though never converted in this life. But the curious part of the speech was that Prince Bismarck treated the Pope as if he were really a most formidable temporal ruler, whose decrees needed energetic resistance, and not rather the head of a powerful sect, and a small one in relation to the German Power, whose opinions should be politically as indifferent to Germany as the opinions of the Spiritualists. What is utterly unintelligible to the British politician is, why Prussia cannot wait to punish and persecute, till Ultramontane doctrines take effect in disloyal actions; why the Pope's opinion,—whatever it be,— about eternal punishments is to be held at all more important than Calvin's, -or half as important as St. John's ? It seems to us that Prince -Bismarck is building up the power he professes to fear.