Part 3 (1/2)

Besides Charlemagne's bishoprics, others founded by Otho the Great were suppressed.

Upon the restoration of the Rhenish provinces to Germany in 1814, the Catholic hierarchy was reestablished and a rearrangement of dioceses took place. A treaty with the Prussian state gave Cologne again an archbishopric, with suffragans at Treves, Munster, and Paderborn, and Count Charles Spiegel zum Desenburg was made archbishop. Other provinces aspired to similar concessions, and certain of the suppressed sees were reerected.

The Lutherized districts, north and eastward of the Rhine, were very extensive, but the influence which went forth again from Cologne served to counteract this to a great extent.

The Catholic hierarchy in Germany is made up as follows:

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ARCHBISHOPRICS

SUFFRAGANS

Posen and Gnesen

Kulm and Ermeland

Breslau

Olmutz

Prague

Cologne

Hildesheim, Osnabruck, Munster,

Paderborn, Fulda,

Limburg, Treves, Mayence.

Freiburg in Breisgau

Wurtemberg, Augsburg,

Munich and Freising

Pa.s.sau and Ratisbon.

Bamberg

Wurzburg, Eichstadt, and

Speyer, and the Vicariat of

Dresden.

Strasburg and Metz

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The religious population of Germany to-day is divided approximately thus: Protestants, 63 per cent; Catholics, 36 per cent; Jews, 1 per cent.

The reign of the pure Gothic spirit in church-building, as far as it ever advanced in Germany, was at an end with the wars of the Hussites and the Reformation of Luther. During these religious and political convulsions, the Gothic spirit may be said to have died, so far as the undertaking of any new or great work goes.

Just as we find in Germany a different speech and a different manner of living from that of either Rome or Gaul, we find also in Germany, or rather in the Rhenish provinces, a marked difference in ecclesiastical art from either of the types which were developing contemporaneously in the neighbouring countries.

The Rhine proved itself a veritable borderland, which neither kept to the strict cla.s.sicism of the Romanesque manner of building, nor yet adopted, without question, the newly arisen Gothic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Architecture and sculpture in its earliest and most approved ecclesiastical forms undoubtedly made its way from Italy to France, Spain, Germany, and England, along the natural travel routes over which came the Roman invaders, conquerors, or civilizers--or whatever we please to think them.

Under each and every environment it developed, as it were, a new style, the flat roofs and low arches giving way for the most part to more lofty and steeper-angled gables and openings. This may have been caused by climatic influences, or it may not; at any rate, church-building--and other building as well--changed as it went northward, and sharp gables and steep sloping lines became not only frequent, but almost universal.

The Comacine Masters, who were the great church-builders of the early days in Italy, went north in the seventh century, still pursuing their mission; to England with St. Augustine, to Germany with Boniface, and Charlemagne himself, as we know, brought them to Aix-la-Chapelle for the work at his church there.

The distinctly Rhenish variety of Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture came to its greatest development under the Suabian or Hohenstaufen line of emperors, reaching its zenith during the reign of the great Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90).

The churches at Neuss, Bonn, Sinzig, and Coblenz all underwent a necessary reconstruction in the early thirteenth century because of ravages during the terrific warfare of the rival claimants to the throne of Barbarossa.