reign, the clergy, under all their forms, engaged a considerable part of
my curiosity. So far from finding (except from one set of men, not then
very numerous, though very active) the complaints and discontents
against that body which some publications had given me reason to expect,
I perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their account.
On further examination, I found the clergy, in general, persons of
moderate minds and decorous manners: I include the seculars, and the
regulars of both sexes. I had not the good fortune to know a great many
of the parochial clergy: but in general I received a perfectly good
account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties. With
some of the higher clergy I had a personal acquaintance, and of the rest
in that class a very good means of information. They were almost all of
them persons of noble birth. They resembled others of their own rank;
and where there was any difference, it was in their favor. They were
more fully educated than the military noblesse,--so as by no means to
disgrace their profession by ignorance, or by want of fitness for the
exercise of their authority. They seemed to me, beyond the clerical
character, liberal and open, with the hearts of gentlemen and men of
honor, neither insolent nor servile in their manners and conduct. They
seemed to me rather a superior class,--a set of men amongst whom you
would not be surprised to find a Fénelon. I saw among the clergy in
Paris (many of the description are not to be met with anywhere) men of
great learning and candor; and I had reason to believe that this
description was not confined to Paris. What I found in other places I
know was accidental, and therefore to be presumed a fair sample. I spent
a few days in a provincial town, where, in the absence of the bishop, I
passed my evenings with three clergymen, his vicars-general, persons who
would have done honor to any church. They were all well-informed; two of
them of deep, general, and extensive erudition, ancient and modern,
Oriental and Western,--particularly in their own profession. They had a
more extensive knowledge of our English divines than I expected; and
they entered into the genius of those writers with a critical accuracy.
One of these gentlemen is since dead: the Abbé Morangis. I pay this
tribute without reluctance to the memory of that noble, reverend,
learned, and excellent person; and I should do the same with equal
cheerfulness to the merits of the others, who I believe are still
living, if I did not fear to hurt those whom I am unable to serve.
Some of these ecclesiastics of rank are, by all titles, persons
deserving of general respect. They are deserving of gratitude from me,
and from many English. If this letter should ever come into their hands,
I hope they will believe there are those of our nation who feel for
their unmerited fall, and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes,
with no common sensibility. What I say of them is a testimony, as far as
one feeble voice can go, which I owe to truth. Whenever the question of
this unnatural persecution is concerned, I will pay it. No one shall
prevent me from being just and grateful. The time is fitted for the
duty; and it is particularly becoming to show our justice and gratitude,
when those who have deserved well of us and of mankind are laboring
under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive power.
You had before your Revolution about a hundred and twenty bishops. A few
of them were men of eminent sanctity, and charity without limit. When we
talk of the heroic, of course we talk of rare virtue. I believe the
instances of eminent depravity may be as rare amongst them as those of
transcendent goodness. Examples of avarice and of licentiousness may be
picked out, I do not question it, by those who delight in the
investigation which leads to such discoveries. A man as old as I am will
not be astonished that several, in every description, do not lead that
perfect life of self-denial, with regard to wealth or to pleasure, which
is wished for by all, by some expected, but by none exacted with more
rigor than by those who are the most attentive to their own interests or
the most indulgent to their own passions. When I was in France, I am
certain that the number of vicious prelates was not great. Certain
individuals among them, not distinguishable for the regularity of their
lives, made some amends for their want of the severe virtues in their
possession of the liberal, and wore endowed with qualities which made
them useful in the Church and State. I am told, that, with few
exceptions, Louis the Sixteenth had been more attentive to character, in
his promotions to that rank, than his immediate predecessor; and I
believe (as some spirit of reform has prevailed through the whole reign)
that it may be true. But the present ruling power has shown a
disposition only to plunder the Church. It has punished _all_ prelates:
which is to favor the vicious, at least in point of reputation. It has
made a degrading pensionary establishment, to which no man of liberal
ideas or liberal condition will destine his children. It must settle
into the lowest classes of the people. As with you the inferior clergy
are not numerous enough for their duties, as these duties are beyond
measure minute and toilsome, as you have left no middle classes of
clergy at their ease, in future nothing of science or erudition can
exist in the Gallican Church. To complete the project, without the least
attention to the rights of patrons, the Assembly has provided in future
an elective clergy: an arrangement which will drive out of the clerical
profession all men of sobriety, all who can pretend to independence in
their function or their conduct,--and which will throw the whole
direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licentious,
bold, crafty, factious, flattering wretches, of such condition and such
habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions (in comparison
of which the stipend of an exciseman is lucrative and honorable) an
object of low and illiberal intrigue. Those officers whom they still
call bishops are to be elected to a provision comparatively mean,
through the same arts, (that is, electioneering arts,) by men of all
religious tenets that are known or can be invented. The new lawgivers
have not ascertained anything whatsoever concerning their
qualifications, relative either to doctrine or to morals, no more than
they have done with regard to the subordinate clergy; nor does it appear
but that both the higher and the lower may, at their discretion,
practise or preach any mode of religion or irreligion that they please.
I do not yet see what the jurisdiction of bishops over their
subordinates is to be, or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at
all.
In short, Sir, it seems to me that this new ecclesiastical establishment
is intended only to be temporary, and preparatory to the utter
abolition, under any of its forms, of the Christian religion, whenever
the minds of men are prepared for this last stroke against it by the
accomplishment of the plan for bringing its ministers into universal
contempt. They who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who
guide in these matters have long entertained such a design are utterly
ignorant of their character and proceedings. These enthusiasts do not
scruple to avow their opinion, that a state can subsist without any
religion better than with one, and that they are able to supply the
place of any good which may be in it by a project of their own,--namely,
by a sort of education they have imagined, founded in a knowledge of the
physical wants of men, progressively carried to an enlightened
self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us, will identify
with an interest more enlarged and public. The scheme of this education
has been long known. Of late they distinguish it (as they have got an
entirely new nomenclature of technical terms) by the name of a _Civic
Education_.
I hope their partisans in England (to whom I rather attribute very
inconsiderate conduct than the ultimate object in this detestable
design) will succeed neither in the pillage of the ecclesiastics nor in
the introduction of a principle of popular election to our bishoprics
and parochial cures. This, in the present condition of the world, would
be the last corruption of the Church, the utter ruin of the clerical
character, the most dangerous shock that the state ever received through
a misunderstood arrangement of religion. I know well enough that the
bishoprics and cures, under kingly and seigniorial patronage, as now
they are in England, and as they have been lately in France, are
sometimes acquired by unworthy methods; but the other mode of
ecclesiastical canvass subjects them infinitely more surely and more
generally to all the evil arts of low ambition, which, operating on and
through greater numbers, will produce mischief in proportion.
Those of you who have robbed the clergy think that they shall easily
reconcile their conduct to all Protestant nations, because the clergy
whom they have thus plundered, degraded, and given over to mockery and
scorn, are of the Roman Catholic, that is, of _their own_ pretended
persuasion. I have no doubt that some miserable bigots will be found
here as well as elsewhere, who hate sects and parties different from
their own more than they love the substance of religion, and who are
more angry with those who differ from them in their particular plans and
systems than displeased with those who attack the foundation of our
common hope. These men will write and speak on the subject in the manner
that is to be expected from their temper and character. Burnet says,
that, when he was in France, in the year 1683, "the method which carried
over the men of the finest parts to Popery was this: they brought
themselves to doubt of the whole Christian religion: when that was once
done, it seemed a more indifferent thing of what side or form they
continued outwardly." If this was then the ecclesiastic policy of
France, it is what they have since but too much reason to repent of.
They preferred atheism to a form of religion not agreeable to their
ideas. They succeeded in destroying that form; and atheism has succeeded
in destroying them. I can readily give credit to Burnet's story; because
I have observed too much of a similar spirit (for a little of it is
"much too much") amongst ourselves. The humor, however, is not general.
The teachers who reformed our religion in England bore no sort of
resemblance to your present reforming doctors in Paris. Perhaps they
were (like those whom they opposed) rather more than could be wished
under the influence of a party spirit; but they were most sincere
believers; men of the most fervent and exalted piety; ready to die (as
some of them did die) like true heroes in defence of their particular
ideas of Christianity,--as they would with equal fortitude, and more
cheerfully, for that stock of general truth for the branches of which
they contended with their blood. These men would have disavowed with
horror those wretches who claimed a fellowship with them upon no other
titles than those of their having pillaged the persons with whom they
maintained controversies, and their having despised the common religion,
for the purity of which they exerted themselves with a zeal which
unequivocally bespoke their highest reverence for the substance of that
system which they wished to reform. Many of their descendants have
retained the same zeal, but (as less engaged in conflict) with more
moderation. They do not forget that justice and mercy are substantial
parts of religion. Impious men do not recommend themselves to their
communion by iniquity and cruelty towards any description of their
fellow-creatures.
We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of
toleration. That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think
none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is
not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from
contempt is no true charity. There are in England abundance of men who
tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the dogmas of
religion, though in different degrees, are all of moment, and that
amongst them there is, as amongst all things of value, a just ground of
preference. They favor, therefore, and they tolerate. They tolerate, not
because they despise opinions, but because they respect justice. They
would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they
love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree, and the
great object to which they are all directed. They begin more and more
plainly to discern that we have all a common cause, as against a common
enemy. They will not be so misled by the spirit of faction as not to
distinguish what is done in favor of their subdivision from those acts
of hostility which, through some particular description, are aimed at
the whole corps in which they themselves, under another denomination,
are included. It is impossible for me to say what may be the character
of every description of men amongst us. But I speak for the greater
part; and for them, I must tell you, that sacrilege is no part of their
doctrine of good works; that, so far from calling you into their
fellowship on such title, if your professors are admitted to their
communion, they must carefully conceal their doctrine of the lawfulness
of the proscription of innocent men, and that they must make restitution
of all stolen goods whatsoever. Till then they are none of ours.
You may suppose that we do not approve your confiscation of the revenues
of bishops, and deans, and chapters, and parochial clergy possessing
independent estates arising from land, because we have the same sort of
establishment in England. That objection, you will say, cannot hold as
to the confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns, and the abolition of
their order. It is true that this particular part of your general
confiscation does not affect England, as a precedent in point; but the
reason applies, and it goes a great way. The Long Parliament confiscated
the lands of deans and chapters in England on the same ideas upon which
your Assembly set to sale the lands of the monastic orders. But it is in
the principle of injustice that the danger lies, and not in the
description of persons on whom it is first exercised. I see, in a
country very near us, a course of policy pursued, which sets justice,
the common concern of mankind, at defiance. With the National Assembly
of France possession is nothing, law and usage are nothing. I see the
National Assembly openly reprobate the doctrine of prescription, which
one of the greatest of their own lawyers[114] tells us, with great
truth, is a part of the law of Nature. He tells us that the positive
ascertainment of its limits, and its security from invasion, were among
the causes for which civil society itself has been instituted. If
prescription be once shaken, no species of property is secure, when it
once becomes an object large enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent
power. I see a practice perfectly correspondent to their contempt of
this great fundamental part of natural law. I see the confiscators begin
with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end
there. I see the princes of the blood, who, by the oldest usages of that
kingdom, held large landed estates, (hardly with the compliment of a
debate,) deprived of their possessions, and, in lieu of their stable,
independent property, reduced to the hope of some precarious charitable
pension at the pleasure of an Assembly, which of course will pay little
regard to the rights of pensioners at pleasure, when it despises those
of legal proprietors. Flushed with the insolence of their first
inglorious victories, and pressed by the distresses caused by their lust
of unhallowed lucre, disappointed, but not discouraged, they have at
length ventured completely to subvert all property of all descriptions
throughout the extent of a great kingdom. They have compelled all men,
in all transactions of commerce, in the disposal of lands, in civil
dealing, and through the whole communion of life, to accept, as perfect
payment and good and lawful tender, the symbols of their speculations on
a projected sale of their plunder. What vestiges of liberty or property
have they left? The tenant-right of a cabbage-garden, a year's interest
in a hovel, the good-will of an ale-house or a baker's shop, the very
shadow of a constructive property, are more ceremoniously treated in our
Parliament than with you the oldest and most valuable landed
possessions, in the hands of the most respectable personages, or than
the whole body of the moneyed and commercial interest of your country.
We entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority; but we have
never dreamt that Parliaments had any right whatever to violate
property, to overrule prescription, or to force a currency of their own
fiction in the place of that which is real, and recognized by the law of
nations. But you, who began with refusing to submit to the most moderate
restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of despotism. I find
the ground upon which your confiscators go is this: that, indeed, their
proceedings could not be supported in a court of justice, but that the
rules of prescription cannot bind a legislative assembly.[115] So that
this legislative assembly of a free nation sits, not for the security,
but for the destruction of property,--and not of property only, but of
every rule and maxim which can give it stability, and of those
instruments which can alone give it circulation.
When the Anabaptists of Munster, in the sixteenth century, had filled
Germany with confusion, by their system of levelling, and their wild
opinions concerning property, to what country in Europe did not the
progress of their fury furnish just cause of alarm? Of all things,
wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all
enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any
kind of resource. We cannot be ignorant of the spirit of atheistical
fanaticism, that is inspired by a multitude of writings dispersed with
incredible assiduity and expense, and by sermons delivered in all the
streets and places of public resort in Paris. These writings and sermons
have filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind, which
supersedes in them the common feelings of Nature, as well as all
sentiments of morality and religion; insomuch that these wretches are
induced to bear with a sullen patience the intolerable distresses
brought upon them by the violent convulsions and permutations that have
been made in property.[116] The spirit of proselytism attends this
spirit of fanaticism. They have societies to cabal and correspond at
home and abroad for the propagation of their tenets. The republic of
Berne, one of the happiest, the most prosperous, and the best-governed
countries upon earth, is one of the great objects at the destruction of
which they aim. I am told they have in some measure succeeded in sowing
there the seeds of discontent. They are busy throughout Germany. Spain
and Italy have not been untried. England is not left out of the
comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity: and in England we find
those who stretch out their arms to them, who recommend their example
from more than one pulpit, and who choose, in more than one periodical
meeting, publicly to correspond with them, to applaud them, and to hold
them up as objects for imitation; who receive from them tokens of
confraternity, and standards consecrated amidst their rites and
mysteries;[117] who suggest to them leagues of perpetual amity, at the
very time when the power to which our Constitution has exclusively
delegated the federative capacity of this kingdom may find it expedient
to make war upon them.
It is not the confiscation of our Church property from this example in
France that I dread, though I think this would be no trifling evil. The
great source of my solicitude is, lest it should ever be considered in
England as the policy of a state to seek a resource in confiscations of
any kind, or that any one description of citizens should be brought to
regard any of the others as their proper prey.[118] Nations are wading
deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public debts, which
at first were a security to governments, by interesting many in the
public tranquillity, are likely in their excess to become the means of
their subversion. If governments provide for these debts by heavy
impositions, they perish by becoming odious to the people. If they do
not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the most
dangerous of all parties: I mean an extensive, discontented moneyed
interest, injured and not destroyed. The men who compose this interest
look for their security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of
government; in the second, to its power. If they find the old
governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not
to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes, they may seek new ones
that shall be possessed of more energy; and this energy will be
derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt of
justice. Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible
to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be
authorized. I am sure that the principles predominant in France extend
to very many persons, and descriptions of persons, in all countries, who
think their innoxious indolence their security. This kind of innocence
in proprietors may be argued into inutility; and inutility into an
unfitness for their estates. Many parts of Europe are in open disorder.
In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused
movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political
world. Already confederacies and correspondences of the most
extraordinary nature are forming in several countries.[119] In such a
state of things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard. In all
mutations (if mutations must be) the circumstance which will serve most
to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in
them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice
and tender of property.
But it will be argued, that this confiscation in France ought not to
alarm other nations. They say it is not made from wanton rapacity; that
it is a great measure of national policy, adopted to remove an
extensive, inveterate, superstitious mischief.--It is with the greatest
difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice. Justice is
itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent
departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of
being no policy at all.
When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the
existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful
occupation,--when they have accommodated all their ideas and all their
habits to it,--when the law had long made their adherence to its rules a
ground of reputation, and their departure from them a ground of disgrace
and even of penalty,--I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an
arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their
feelings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and
to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and those customs
which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honor. If
to this be added an expulsion from their habitations and a confiscation
of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this
despotic sport made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and
properties of men can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.