us who have wished to pledge the societies of Paris in the
cup of their abominations have been disappointed. The robbery of your
Church has proved a security to the possessions of ours. It has roused
the people. They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless
act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and more open, their
eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of
sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and
fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine. At home we behold similar
beginnings. We are on our guard against similar conclusions.

I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the duties
imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon any pretest of
public service, to confiscate the goods of a single unoffending citizen.
Who but a tyrant (a name expressive of everything which can vitiate and
degrade human nature) could think of seizing on the property of men,
unaccused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds and
thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace of humanity could
think of casting down men of exalted rank and sacred function, some of
them of an age to call at once for reverence and compassion,--of casting
them down from the highest situation in the commonwealth, wherein they
were maintained by their own landed property, to a state of indigence,
depression, and contempt?

The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from
the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been
so harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast
to the harpies of usury. But to drive men from independence to live on
alms is itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable condition
to men in one state of life, and not habituated to other things, may,
when all these circumstances are altered, be a dreadful revolution, and
one to which a virtuous mind would feel pain in condemning any guilt,
except that which would demand the life of the offender. But to many
minds this punishment of _degradation_ and _infamy_ is worse than death.
Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this cruel suffering, that
the persons who were taught a double prejudice in favor of religion, by
education, and by the place they held in the administration of its
functions, are to receive the remnants of their property as alms from
the profane and impious hands of those who had plu