POPE Leo’s recent diplomatic inaction with regard to the French Associations Bill seemed to betoken a temper, if not of tolerance, at least of political discretion. But his latest brief is calculated to remind us forcibly that the Pope is still Giant Pope after all. There can be no objection, of course, to the head of the Roman Catholic Church organising an anti-Protestant propaganda in Rome, and putting Cardinals, or any dignitaries he thinks fit, at the head of it. Free discussion and propaganda are of the essence of modern liberty, and the Pope has as much right to a fair field in the struggle as any Protestant missionary society. But that he wants something quite other than a fair field is unmistakably evidenced by the terms and tone of the brief, which expresses frankly the old intolerant and exclusive spirit of the mediæval Papacy. Pope Leo is described as complaining bitterly in this document of the liberty granted in Rome to the propagation of heresy, and asserting that the existence of Protestant schools and churches is a great danger to the Catholic Church. The utterance is a most damaging one in every way, for not only does it show—what we need hardly to be told—that the papal system is one of repression and not of persuasion, but it confesses, with strange naivete, the weakness of the papal cause. If Protestant schools and churches can do so much damage, it must be because the Catholic organisation is comparatively weak in persuasive power. So the Pope in despair calls out for the old evil weapon which his predecessors used so long till it was struck from their grasp. It is useless for the Papacy to talk of tolerance; ecclesiasticism in that shape is never tolerant save when it has no coercive power. The bitter lament for the lack of that power is an ominous indication of what would be the fate of the present free capital of Italy if anything so impossible and unthinkable as a revival of the Pope’s temporal sovereignty were accomplished.—December 4th, 2902.