The Constituent Assembly had committed a gross error in stopping at a half measure in reforming the clergy in France.  Mirabeau himself had been weak on this question.  The Revolution was at the bottom only the legitimate rising of political liberty against despotism, and of religious liberty against the legal domination of Catholicism, because a political institution.  The constitution had emancipated the citizens, and it was necessary to emancipate the faithful, and to claim consciences for the state, in order to restore them to themselves, to individual reason, and to God.  This is what philosophy desired, which is only the rational expression of the mind’s impulses.

The philosophers of the Constituent Assembly receded before the difficulties of this labour.  Instead of an emancipation, they made a compact with the power of the clergy, the dreaded influences of the court of Rome, and the inveterate habits of the people.  They contented themselves with relaxing the chain which bound the state to the church.  Their duty was to have snapped it asunder.  The throne was chained to the altar, they desired to chain the altar to the throne.  It was only displacing tyranny,—­oppressing conscience by law instead of oppressing the law by conscience.

The civil constitution of the clergy was the expression of this reciprocal false position.  The clergy was deprived of these endowments in landed estates, which decimated property and population in France.  They deprived it of its benefices, its abbeys, and its tithes—­the altar’s feudality.  It received in lieu an endowment in salaries levied on the taxes.  As the condition of this arrangement, which gave to the working clergy an existence, influence, and a powerful body of ministers of worship paid by the state, they required the clergy to take the oath of the constitution.  This constitution comprised articles which affected the spiritual supremacy and administrative privileges of the court of Rome.  Catholicism became alarmed and protested; consciences were disturbed.  The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful.  Amongst the bishops and the priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their existence; others refused, or, after having taken it, retracted.  This gave rise to trouble in many minds, agitation in consciences, division in the temples.  The great majority of parishes had two ministers,—­the one a constitutional priest, salaried and protected by the government, the other refractory, refusing the oath, deprived of his income, driven from the church, and raising altar opposing altar in some clandestine chapel, or in the open field.  These two ministers of the same worship excommunicated each other, the one in the name of the constitution, and the other in the name of the Pope and of the church.  The population was also divided according to the greater or lesser degree of revolutionary