iberalities, taxes and over taxes
the congregations, so that, not merely through the diminution of its
allowances it relieves itself at the expense of the Church, but again,
through the increase of its imposts, it burdens the Church for its
own advantage. The episcopacy obtains all necessary funds through
collections in the churches and at domiciles, through the gifts and
subscriptions of the faithful; and, every year, it needs millions, apart
from the budget appropriation, for its faculties and universities
in which it installs largely paid professors, for the construction,
location and arrangement of its countless buildings, for the expenses of
its minor schools, for the support of its ten thousand seminarists, for
the general out-lay on so many charitable institutions; and it is the
bishop who, their principal promoter, must provide for this, all the
more because he has often taken it upon himself in advance, and made
himself responsible for it by either a written or verbal promise. He
responds to all these engagements; he has funds on hand at the maturity
of each contract. In 1883, the bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred
thousand francs to build a school-house with a work-room attached to it,
mentions this to a number of persons assembled in his drawing-room; one
of these puts his hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs,
and others subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand
francs.[5257] Cardinal Mathieu, during his administration, archbishop
of Besancon, thus collects and expends four millions. Lately, Cardinal
Lavigerie, to whom the budget allows fifteen thousand francs per
annum, wrote that he had spent eighteen hundred thousand francs and had
incurred no debt.[5258]--Through this initiative and this ascendancy the
bishop becomes a central social rallying-point; there is no other in
the provinces, nothing but so many disjointed lives, juxtaposed and kept
together in an artificial circle prescribed from above; so that a
good many of these, and of most consideration, gravitate to and group
themselves, especially since 1830, around this last permanent center and
form a part of its body; he is the sole germinating, vivifying, intact
center that still agglutinates scattered wills and suitably organizes
them. Naturally, class and party interests incorporate themselves
additionally along with the Catholic interest which he represents, and
his ecclesiastical authority becomes a political