fusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.

All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at
large, and still more so to the vulgar. It sees in religion only what
is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of
government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and
that will be more and too much. Alongside of the tax-collector and the
gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen
encounter the cure in his cassock who, in the name of the Church,
as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and
subjects him to rules and regulations. Now every rule is annoying and
the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after
paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the
law; the cure is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and
in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely. He admonishes his
parishioners in the confessional and from the pulpit, he lords it over
them even in their inmost being, and his injunctions bind them in every
act, even at home, around the fireside, at table and in bed, comprising
their moments of repose and relaxation, even hours of leisure and in the
tavern. Villagers, after listening to a sermon against the tavern and
drunkenness, murmur and are heard to exclaim: "Why does he meddle with
our affairs? Let him say his mass and leave us alone." They need him
for baptism, marriage and burial, but their affairs do not concern him.
Moreover, among the observances he prescribes, many are inconvenient,
tasteless or disagreeable--fasting, Lent, a passive part in a Latin
mass, prolonged services, ceremonies of which the details are all
insignificant, but of which the symbolic meaning is to-day of no account
to people in attendance; add to all this the mechanical recitation of
the Pater and of the Ave, genuflections and crossing one's self, and
especially obligatory confession at specified dates. Nowadays the worker
and the peasant manage without these constraints. In many villages,
there is nobody at high mass on Sundays but women, and often, in small
numbers, one or two troops of children led by the clerical instructor
and by the "Sister," with a few old men; the great majority of the men
remain outside, under the porch and on the square before the church
chatting with each other about the crops, on local news and on the
weath