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In the Tartar city there are Yellow Lama temples, with hundreds of bare-pated lama priests, the results of Buddhist Concordats guaranteeing Thibetan semi-independence in return for a tacit acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty.
And being by virtue of their charge the masters, if they consent to sign covenants, Concordats, it is only as matters of form; they do not observe them, and never yield to anything but force, always reserving the principle of their absolute sovereignty which must some day finally triumph.
Glory be now to her young and most devout of catholic sovereigns! but are you not aware, that in the reign of Joseph the bishops in that empire were not allowed to write to, or correspond freely with, the Pope? . . . I suppose, forsooth, you expect observance of the law from those liberal governments of yours, which make the first use of their liberty to destroy liberty itself; who exile bishops, and who, in the face of all the world, break the plighted faith of treaties and concordats oh yes, those governments, who spy into the most secret recesses of family life, and create the monstrous and tyrannical Loi des suspects, oh yes, they are sure to respect the liberty and the independence of the Bishop of Rome! and are you baby enough to believe or imagine it?"
From the republic of Cracow, poor remnant of Poland, swallowed by Austria, down to the freedom of the press guaranteed to Germany, but reduced to such a condition that, in the native land of Guttenberg, not one square yard of soil is left to set a free press upon, everything that was not evil in those inviolable treaties has been trampled down, to the profit of despotism, of concordats, of Jesuits, and of benighting darkness.
Each of these concordats supposes that the Pope possesses some power in the country, which he is enabled to concede to the sovereign with whom the concordat is made. That is a point which we can never yield to any sovereign whatever. There is no sovereign, be he who he may, who has any power in this country to confer upon his majesty. We must keep our sovereign clear from such transactions.
The King of Prussia exercises the power which he does over the Roman Catholic church, in her various dominions, under different concordats made with the Pope: in Silesia, under a concordat made by Buonaparte with the Pope; and in the territories on the right bank of the Rhine, under the concordat made by the former sovereigns of those countries with the Pope.
The emperor turned his back on him. "The only and exclusive object of the council of 1811," the Abbe de Pradt has said in his "Histoire des quatre Concordats," "was to regulate the order of Canonical Institution, and to provide that it should not henceforth be hindered by any other cause than the objections urged against the appointments by the Pope.
And being by virtue of their charge the masters, if they consent to sign covenants, Concordats, it is only as matters of form; they do not observe them, and never yield to anything but force, always reserving the principle of their absolute sovereignty which must some day finally triumph.
On certain questions of importance the national hierarchies were inclined to side with the State against the Pope; and thus, for example, the claims of the Curia to tax the clergy, and to override the rights of ecclesiastical patrons, were restricted at one time or another by concordats, or by secular legislation such as the English statutes of Provisors and Praemunire.
The fall of the Jewish Temple, the ruin of the pagan world, the repulse of the Crusades, the humiliation of Boniface VIII, Galileo flinging the world back into giddy space, the infinitely little becoming more mighty than the great, the downfall of kingdoms, and the end of the Concordats, all these for a time threw the minds of men out of their reckoning.