lican substitute, officiating in a municipal scarf, Peter or
Paul, a lay-man like themselves, more or less married and convivialist,
sent from Paris to preach a course of Jacobin morality.[3180]--Their
attachment to their clergy, to the entire body regular and secular, is
due to this contrast. Previously, they were not always well-disposed to
it; the peasantry, nowhere, were content to pay tithes, and the artisan,
as well as the peasant, regarded the idle, well-endowed, meditative
monks as but little more than so many fat drones. The man of the people
in France, by virtue of being a Gaul, has a dry, limited imagination;
he is not inclined to veneration, but is rather mocking, critical and
insubordinate at the powers above him, with a hereditary undertone of
distrust and envy at every man who wears a cloth suit and who eats and
drinks without doing manual labor.--At this time, his clergy do not
excite his envy, but his pity; monks and nuns, cure's and prelates,
roofless, without bread, imprisoned, transported, guillotined, or, at
best, fugitives, hunted down and more unfortunate than wild beasts--it
is he who, during the persecutions of the years II, IV and VI, harbors
them, conceals them, lodges them and feeds them. He sees them suffering
for their faith, which is his faith, and, before their constancy, equal
to that of the legendary martyrs, his indifference changes into respect
and next into zeal. From the year IV,[3181] the orthodox priests have
again recovered their place and ascendancy in his soul which the creed
assigns to them; they have again become his serviceable guides, his
accepted directors, the only warranted interpreters of Christian truth,
the only authorized dispensers and ministers of divine grace. He attends
their mass immediately on their return and will put up with no other.
Brutalized as he may be, or indifferent and dull, and his mind filled
with nothing but animal concerns, he needs them;[3182] he misses their
solemnities, the great festivals, the Sunday; and this privation is a
periodical want both for eyes and ears; he misses the ceremonial, the
lights, the chants, the ringing of the bells, the morning and evening
Angelus.--Thus, whether he knows it or not, his heart and senses are
Catholic[3183] and he demands the old church back again. Before the
Revolution, this church lived on its own revenues; 70,000 priests,
37,000 nuns, 23,000 monks, supported by endowments, cost the State
nothing, and sca