urch
were burst open in a moment. They called for a priest; no priest
appeared. The tumult augmented. The church and the neighbouring
streets resounded with the groans and threats of ten thousand persons.
Their agitation became more violent, and there was no possibility of
foreseeing where the effervescence of popular feeling would stop, when
a messenger arrived from the court, who ordered, in the name of the
King, that the funeral should proceed.

The accounts of this event, and the comments to which it gave rise,
excited the most lively interest in Paris and throughout France: nor
did it fail to give the greatest pleasure to the enemies of religion.
The friends of public decency and good order accused the government of
encouraging the alarming progress of sacerdotal despotism. It was
particularly in the smaller towns, and in the country, that the
priests behaved with the most blamable audacity, abusing the privilege
of speech which had been restored to them[16]. The pulpit became a
tribunal from whence they pronounced sentence of present infamy, with
the reversion of eternal damnation, upon all who refused to
participate in their opinions and bigotry. Making common cause with
the emigrants, they employed hints, inuendoes, insinuations,
arguments, promises, and threats of every species, for the purpose of
compelling the owners of the national property to yield up their
lands, and of leading the wretched peasantry again beneath the tyrant
yokes of feudality and superstition.

[Footnote 16: Under the reign of Napoleon, if a
priest had ventured to utter any opinion contrary
to the system of government, he would have been
immediately removed.]

During the revolution, the priesthood had betrayed its real character.
Contempt had fallen on the clergy, and it was out of the power of the
government to invest them suddenly with the salutary influence which
they had lost. This influence ought to be gained by wise and prudent
conduct, by active and impartial benevolence, by the practice of
sacerdotal virtues. It cannot be gained by ordonnances of police, by
abuse, by violence, by mumming processions, which, in our times, are
out of character and ridiculous.

By the charter the liberty of the press had been guarantied as well as
the liberty of public worship; yet every day innumerable publications
were seized or suppressed contrary to the laws. M. Durb