It has
made a degrading pensionary establishment, to which no man of liberal
ideas or liberal condition will destine his children. It must settle
into the lowest classes of the people. As with you the inferior clergy
are not numerous enough for their duties, as these duties are beyond
measure minute and toilsome, as you have left no middle classes of
clergy at their ease, in future nothing of science or erudition can
exist in the Gallican Church. To complete the project, without the least
attention to the rights of patrons, the Assembly has provided in future
an elective clergy: an arrangement which will drive out of the clerical
profession all men of sobriety, all who can pretend to independence in
their function or their conduct,--and which will throw the whole
direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licentious,
bold, crafty, factious, flattering wretches, of such condition and such
habits of life as will make their contemptible pensions (in comparison
of which the stipend of an exciseman is lucrative and honorable) an
object of low and illiberal intrigue. Those officers whom they still
call bishops are to be elected to a provision comparatively mean,
through the same arts, (that is, electioneering arts,) by men of all
religious tenets that are known or can be invented. The new lawgivers
have not ascertained anything whatsoever concerning their
qualifications, relative either to doctrine or to morals, no more than
they have done with regard to the subordinate clergy; nor does it appear
but that both the higher and the lower may, at their discretion,
practise or preach any mode of religion or irreligion that they please.
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