I allow all this, because I am a man who have to deal with
men, and who would not, through a violence of toleration, run into the
greatest of all intolerance. I must bear with infirmities, until they
fester into crimes.
Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from frailty to vice,
ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and a firm hand. But is it true
that the body of your clergy had passed those limits of a just
allowance? Prom the general style of your late publications of all
sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a
sort of monsters: an horrible composition of superstition, ignorance,
sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true? Is it true that
the lapse of time, the cessation of conflicting interests, the woful
experience of the evils resulting from party rage, have had no sort of
influence gradually to meliorate their minds? Is it true that they were
daily renewing invasions on the civil power, troubling the domestic
quiet of their country, and rendering the operations of its government
feeble and precarious? Is it true that the clergy of our times have
pressed down the laity with an iron hand, and were in all places
lighting up the fires of a savage persecution? Did they by every fraud
endeavor to increase their estates? Did they use to exceed the due
demands on estates that were their own? Or, rigidly screwing up right
into wrong, did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious extortion?
When not possessed of power, were they filled with the vices of those
who envy it? Were they inflamed with a violent, litigious spirit of
controversy? Goaded on with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty,
were they ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches,
to massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down altars, and
to make their way over the ruins of subverted governments to an empire
of doctrine, sometimes flattering, sometimes forcing, the consciences of
men from the jurisdiction of public institutions into a submission to
their personal authority, beginning with a claim of liberty and ending
with an abuse of power?
These, or some of these, were the vices objected, and not wholly
without foundation, to several of the churchmen of former times, who
belonged to the two great parties which then divided and distracted
Europe.
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