The plea of the Liberal Catholics for freedom of conscience became more and more offensive to the Catholics. The Fathers of Laach, in censuring the address of the laymen of Coblentz, went so far as to say that the treatment of the Jews in Rome "showed no want of humanity or civil tolerance." These educated laymen well knew that the proper condition of heretics, according to the same principles, ought to be much worse than that of the Ghetto Jews. The latter, not being baptized, were theoretically not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church, but the others, as Bellarmine shows, _though not of the Church, belonged to the Church_. Stumpf, writing in the Bonn _Literaturblatt_, did not content himself with questioning the intolerant doctrine of the Jesuits; he directly attacked it. He took an important step further--one, indeed, which seems like a new life in the Roman Catholic intellect. He told the Jesuits plainly that their exclusive principle of one _fold_ rendered religious freedom and unity impossible. Here he touched the distinction between the grand and the huge, which Romanists carefully keep out of sight, and which the sincerest advocates of liberty in their ranks had hitherto overlooked. They took for a grand conception of the unity of Christians, as consisting in submission to one human head. That conception is narrow and illusory. It fails of grandeur by monstrous disproportion. Stumpf goes on to declare that the absolute dominion of the Church over the State, although the favourite doctrine as he admits, in Rome, is in contradiction to the fundamental principle of Christianity. He would no longer be content, as a Liberal Catholic, to plead for freedom of conscience merely as a compromise. He says, We now represent a principle. The theocratic principle menaces society, and that principle will never be satisfied till the acknowledgment of civil rights is made to depend upon the profession of the Catholic faith. He adds that a promise to compromise _till we had the power_ would content no one, because the modern world has learned that nothing is settled till the principle is settled. He says, We are determined to have the Church a Church, and the State a State. But this a postulate which demands, as its condition, individual freedom. According to him it was Christ that introduced among men the idea of independence, and that of a limit existing to the power of the State, by distinguishing His own kingdom of love and grace from that of law and compulsion. "When the Church authorities," says Stumpf, "do admonish the rulers of the State, their first counsel should be to consider it their highest duty to protect freedom of conscience. They ought to warn them, before any other kind of unrighteousness against the use of force, for or against any form of religion which is not inconsistent with the maintenance of moral law"; and he adds, what we shall emphasize, "_privation of civil equality is an employment of force_." Such, he says, was the counsel given by the early Christian teachers; and though later teachers reversed it, their course is not to be justified before the law of Christ.