artial propensity. He feels no
ennobling principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the
artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to
opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant,
envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or
representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what
had long nourished in splendor and in honor. I do not like to see
anything destroyed, any void produced in society, any ruin on the face
of the land. It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction
that my inquiries and observations did not present to me any
incorrigible vices in the noblesse of France, or any abuse which could
not be removed by a reform very short of abolition. Your noblesse did
not deserve punishment; but to degrade is to punish.

It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry
concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my
ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with
much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they
are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or
exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is
a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses there were
undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It was an old establishment, and
not frequently revised. But I saw no crimes in the individuals that
merited confiscation of their substance, nor those cruel insults and
degradations, and that unnatural persecution, which have been
substituted in the place of meliorating regulation.

If there had been any just cause for this new religions persecution, the
atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to
plunder, do not love anybody so much as not to dwell with complacence on
the vices of the existing clergy. This they have not done. They find
themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they
have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every
instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body
or in its favor, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous because very
illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions and their
own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family
distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very
just to chastise men for the offe