But the finances were in a hopeless state.  With credit gone, taxation exhausted, and a continually increasing floating debt, the situation was truly appalling to any statesman.  It was at this juncture that Talleyrand, a priest of noble birth, as able as he was unscrupulous, brought forth his famous measure for the spoliation of the Church, to which body he belonged, and to which he was a disgrace.  Talleyrand, as Bishop of Autun, had been one of the original representatives of the clergy on the first convocation of the States-General; he had advocated combining with the Third Estate when they pronounced themselves the National Assembly, had himself joined the Assembly, attracted notice by his speeches, been appointed to draw up a constitution, taken active part in the declaration of Rights, and made himself generally conspicuous and efficient.  At the present apparently hopeless financial crisis, Talleyrand uncovered a new source of revenue, claimed that the property of the Church belonged to the nation, and that as the nation was on the brink of financial ruin, this confiscation was a supreme necessity.  The Church lands represented a value of two thousand millions of francs,—­an immense sum, which, if sold, would relieve, it was supposed, the necessities of the State.  Mirabeau, although he was no friend of the clergy, shrank from such a monstrous injustice, and said that such a wound as this would prove the most poisonous which the country had received.  But such was the urgent need of money, that the Assembly on the 2d of November, 1789, decreed that the property of the Church should be put at the disposal of the State.  On the 19th of December it was decreed that these lands should be sold.  The clergy raised the most piteous cries of grief and indignation.  Vainly did the bishops offer four hundred millions as a gift to the nation.  It was like the offer of Darius to Alexander, of one hundred thousand talents.  “Your whole property is mine,” said the conqueror; “your kingdom is mine.”

So the offer of the bishops was rejected, and their whole property was taken.  And it was taken under the sophistical plea that it belonged to the nation.  It was really the gift of various benefactors in different ages to the Church, for pious purposes, and had been universally recognized as sacred.  It was as sacred as any other rights of property.  The spoliation was infinitely worse than the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII.  He had some excuse, since they had become a scandal, had misused their wealth, and diverted it from the purposes originally intended.  The only wholesale attack on property by the State which can be compared with it, was the abolition of slavery by a stroke of the pen in the American Rebellion.  But this was a war measure, when the country was in most imminent peril; and it was also a moral measure in behalf of philanthropy.  The spoliation of the clergy by the National Assembly was a great injustice, since it was not urged that the clergy had misused