Political Evolution. 57 



When, after the religious disruption of the sixteenth 

 century, the Swiss Confederation settled down into a 

 certain number of Catholic and a certain number of 

 Protestant communities, an intimate union of Church and 

 State became the rule in the respective cantons. The 

 rigid theocracy of Geneva is well known to all, but in 

 the Catholic as in the Protestant cantons, Church laws 

 were enforced by secular authority, and thus much of 

 mediaeval theocracy has been preserved down to the 

 present day by these small communities. 



Now, however, repudiation of the Christian theocracy 

 is making its way in Switzerland, but by a singular in- 

 version it is the non-Christian part of the nation which 

 is seeking, to prolong its forms, while those who are par 

 excellence the very representatives of that theocracy are 

 being gradually driven to take up a position hostile to 

 them. This inversion has arisen through changes by 

 which, owing to the union of Church and State, power 

 over the Church has come into the hands of those most 

 hostile to her, and we have as a result the grotesque 

 exhibition of ex-priests, who have violated ail their own 

 vows in the name of liberty of conscience, becoming the 

 willing agents of an anti-Christian government in robbing 

 and oppressing Christians amongst whom that govern- 

 ment has enabled them to intrude. 



In Berne we also find an anti-Christian government 

 taking upon itself to decide what doctrines its fellow- 



