I
allow all this, because I am a man who has to deal with men, and who
would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the greatest
of all intolerance. I must bear with infirmities until they fester
into crimes.
Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from frailty to
vice, ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand. But
is it true that the body of your clergy had passed those limits of a
just allowance? From the general style of your late publications of
all sorts one would be led to believe that your clergy in France
were a sort of monsters, a horrible composition of superstition,
ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true? Is it
true that the lapse of time, the cessation of conflicting interests,
the woeful experience of the evils resulting from party rage have
had no sort of influence gradually to meliorate their minds? Is it
true that they were daily renewing invasions on the civil power,
troubling the domestic quiet of their country, and rendering the
operations of its government feeble and precarious? Is it true that
the clergy of our times have pressed down the laity with an iron
hand and were in all places lighting up the fires of a savage
persecution? Did they by every fraud endeavor to increase their
estates? Did they use to exceed the due demands on estates that were
their own? Or, rigidly screwing up right into wrong, did they
convert a legal claim into a vexatious extortion? When not possessed
of power, were they filled with the vices of those who envy it? Were
they inflamed with a violent, litigious spirit of controversy?
Goaded on with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty, were they
ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches, to
massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down altars, and
to make their way over the ruins of subverted governments to an empire
of doctrine, sometimes flattering, sometimes forcing the consciences
of men from the jurisdiction of public institutions into a
submission of their personal authority, beginning with a claim of
liberty and ending with an abuse of power?
These, or some of these, were the vices objected, and not wholly
without foundation, to several of the churchmen of former times who
belonged to the two great parties which then divided and distracted
Europe.
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