wavering and correspondence, signed a recantation; Wenceslaus forwarded Hontheim's corrected and revised, 15 November 1778, recantation to the Holy See. Lauchert wrote Hontheim's recantation was not sincere as evident from his subsequent actions; his , written to justify his recantation to the public, shows Hontheim had not relinquished his ideas. This book was purported to be a proof that his submission had been made of his own free will; it carefully avoided all the most burning questions, rather tended to show as his correspondence proves that Hontheim had not essentially shifted his standpoint; but Rome, from that time forward, left him in peace and removal of the censure followed that year. The Febronian doctrine, in fact, exactly fitted the views of the German bishops, which were by no means disinterested. It must be remembered that the German bishops were at this time great secular princes rather than Catholic prelates; with rare exceptions, they made no pretense of carrying out their spiritual duties; they shared to the full in the somewhat shallow Enlightenment of the age. As princes of the Empire they had asserted their practical independence of the emperor; they were irked by what they considered the unjustifiable interference of the Curia with their sovereign prerogatives, and wished to establish their independence of the pope also. In the ranks of the hierarchy, then, selfish motives combined with others more respectable to secure the acceptance of the Febronian position. Among secular rulers the welcome given to it was even less equivocal. Even so devout a sovereign as Maria Theresa of Austria refused to allow Febronius to be forbidden in the Habsburg dominions; her son, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, applied the Febronian principles with remorseless thoroughness. In Venice, in Tuscany, in Naples, in Portugal, they inspired the vigorous efforts of enlightened despots to reform the Church from above; and they gave a fresh impetus to the movement against the Jesuits, which, under pressure of the secular governments, culminated in the Suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. According to Lauchert, the first attempt to give Febronian principles a practical application was made in Germany at the Koblenz Conference of 1769, where the three ecclesiastic prince-electors, through their delegates, and under the directions of Hontheim, compiled a list of thirty grievances against the Curia, in consonance with the principles of the "Febronius"; and after submitting them to