the French clergy had not only
identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of
physical science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that
they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past, to exercise
any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had
identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with
persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of Louis XIV., with the
murder of Calas and of Urban Grandier; with celibacy, hysteria,
demonology, witchcraft, and the shameful public scandals, like those of
Gauffredi, Grandier, and Pere Giraud, which had arisen out of mental
disease; with forms of worship which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)
idolatry, and miracles which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)
impostures; that the clergy interfered perpetually with the sanctity of
family life, as well as with the welfare of the state; that their evil
counsels, and specially those of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent
causes of much of the misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s
reigns; and that with all these heavy counts against them, their morality
was not such as to make other men more moral; and was not--at least among
the hierarchy--improving, or likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a De Retz,
a Richelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a Dubois, a Rohan, a
Lomenie de Brienne, a Maury, a Talleyrand; and at the revolution of 1789
thoughtful Frenchmen asked, once and for all, what was to be done with a
Church of which these were the hierophants?

Whether these complaints affected the French Church as a "religious"
institution, must depend entirely on the meaning which is attached to the
word "religion": that they affected her on scientific, rational, and
moral grounds, independent of any merely political one, is as patent as
that the attack based on them was one-sided, virulent, and often somewhat
hypocritical, considering the private morals of many of the assailants.
We know--or ought to know--that within that religion which seemed to the
_philosophes_ (so distorted and defaced had it become) a nightmare dream,
crushing the life out of mankind, there lie elements divine, eternal;
necessary for man in this life and the life to come. But we are bound to
ask--Had they a fair chance of knowing what we know? Have we proof that
their hatred was against all religion, or only against that which they
saw around them? Have we proof that th