But to drive men from
independence to live on alms is itself great cruelty. That which might
be a tolerable condition to men in one state of life, and not
habituated to other things, may, when all these circumstances are
altered, be a dreadful revolution, and one to which a virtuous mind
would feel pain in condemning any guilt except that which would demand
the life of the offender. But to many minds this punishment of
degradation and infamy is worse than death. Undoubtedly it is an
infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering that the persons who were
taught a double prejudice in favor of religion, by education and by
the place they held in the administration of its functions, are to
receive the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and
impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the rest; to
receive (if they are at all to receive), not from the charitable
contributions of the faithful but from the insolent tenderness of
known and avowed atheism, the maintenance of religion measured out
to them on the standard of the contempt in which it is held, and for
the purpose of rendering those who receive the allowance vile and of
no estimation in the eyes of mankind.
But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment in
law, and not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the
academies of the Palais Royal and the Jacobins that certain men had no
right to the possessions which they held under law, usage, the
decisions of courts, and the accumulated prescription of a thousand
years.
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