The Project Gutenberg EBook of Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant
French Clergy (1793), by Frances Burney

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Title: Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793)

Author: Frances Burney

Release Date: June 15, 2009 [EBook #29125]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note

The punctuation and spelling from the original text have been faithfully
preserved.

BRIEF

REFLECTIONS

RELATIVE TO THE

EMIGRANT FRENCH CLERGY:

EARNESTLY SUBMITTED

TO THE HUMANE CONSIDERATION

OF THE

LADIES OF GREAT BRITAIN.

_BY THE AUTHOR OF_
EVELINA AND CECILIA.

London:
PRINTED BY T. DAVISON,
FOR THOMAS CADELL, IN THE STRAND.
1793.

[Price one Shilling and Sixpence.]

[Asterism] _The profits of this Publication are to be wholly
appropriated to the Relief of the_

EMIGRANT FRENCH CLERGY.

APOLOGY.

However wide from the allotted boundaries and appointed province of
Females may be all interference in public matters, even in the agitating
season of general calamity; it does not thence follow that they are
exempt from all public claims, or mere passive spectatresses of the
moral as well as of the political oeconomy of human life. The distinct
ties of their prescriptive duties, which, pointed out by Nature, have
been recognised by reason, and established by custom, remove, indeed,
from their view and knowledge all materials for forming public
characters. The privacy, therefore, of their lives is the dictate of
common sense, stimulated by local discretion. But in the doctrine of
morality the reverse is the case, and their feminine deficiencies are
there changed into advantages: since the retirement, which divests them
of practical skills for public purposes, guards them, at the same time,
from the heart-hardening effects of general worldly commerce. It gives
them leisure to reflect and to refine, not merely upon the virtues, but
the pleasures of benevolence; not only and