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, practice or preach any mode of religion or
irreligion that they please.
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