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On his part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope's attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others.

A young priest who said his prayers before lying down on his straw mattress or in the mud of his trench, put a check upon blasphemy, and his fellows anti-clericals perhaps in the old days or frank materialists watched him curiously and were thoughtful after their watchfulness. It was easy to see that he was eager to give up his life as a sacrifice to the God of his faith.

He was too much ashamed to air the most serious of his grievances: the suspicion created among the officers by the appeal to informers, the humiliation of having to submit to the insolent orders of certain crass and mischievous politicians, the army's disgust at being put to base police duty, taking inventories of the churches, putting down industrial strikes, at the bidding of capital and the spite of the party in power the petty burgess radicals and anti-clericals against the rest of the country.

With reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals.

Among the ecclesiastics themselves there were not a few who desired to improve clerical administration from within, but without diminution of ecclesiastical authority; the anti-clericals were laymen who wished the reforms to be forced on the Church from outside, reducing ecclesiastical authority in the process.

Nor are the Serbs and the Pan-Germans the only ones to whom the crime might logically be traced. Ferdinand, remember, had many enemies within the borders of his own country. The Austrian anti-clericals hated and distrusted him because he surrounded himself by Jesuit advisers and because he was believed to be unduly under the influence of the Church of Rome.

Hippolyte Ceres had now established himself as leader of the radicals, socialists, and anti-clericals, and they appointed him President of their group, which was then the most considerable in the House. He thus found himself marked out for office in the next ministerial combination. After a long hesitation Eveline Clarence accepted the idea of marrying M. Hippolyte Ceres.

Theiner asserts that he knew nothing of it: that it was an official intrigue got up at the last moment by the anti-clericals so as to precipitate a rupture. In support of this view, he cites letters of Maret and Hauterive as inculpating these men and tending to free Bonaparte from suspicion of complicity. But the letters cannot be said to dissipate all suspicion.

He produced, that is to say, with astonishing fluency all those arguments that were common in the mouths of the more serious anti-clericals of the beginning of the century the increase of Religious Orders, the domineering tendency of all ecclesiastics in the enjoyment of temporal power, the impossibility of combating supernatural arguments, the hostility of the Church to education down even to the celibacy of the clergy.

Then came the anti-clerical wave in French politics, and on its crest a new commandant to the School of War a man elevated by the anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation by pleasing those who put him there. Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was reared, and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.