I. Services and Recompenses of the Clergy.

Of these three layered foundations the most ancient and deepest was the work of the clergy.  For twelve hundred years and more they had labored upon it, both as architects and workmen, at first alone and then almost alone. — In the beginning, during the first four centuries, they constituted religion and the church.  Let us ponder over these two words; in order to weigh them well.  One the one hand, in a society founded on conquest, hard and cold like a machine of brass, forced by its very structure to destroy among its subjects all courage to act and all desire to live, they had proclaimed the “glad tidings,” held forth the “kingdom of God,” preached loving resignation in the hands of a Heavenly Father, inspired patience, gentleness, humility, self-abnegation, and charity, and opened the only issues by which Man stifling in the Roman ‘ergastulum’ could again breathe and see daylight:  and here we have religion.  On the other hand, in a State gradually undergoing depopulation, crumbling away, and fatally becoming a prey, they had formed a living society governed by laws and discipline, rallying around a common aim and a common doctrine, sustained by the devotion of chiefs and by the obedience of believes, alone capable of subsisting beneath the flood of barbarians which the empire in ruin suffered to pour in through its breaches:  and here we have the church. — It continues to build on these two first foundations, and after the invasion, for over five hundred years, it saves what it can still save of human culture.  It marches in the van of the barbarians or converts them directly after their entrance, which is a wonderful advantage.  Let us judge of it by a single fact:  In Great Britain, which like Gaul had become Latin, but whereof the conquerors remain pagan during a century and a half, arts, industries, society, language, all were destroyed; nothing remained of an entire people, either massacred or fugitive, but slaves.  We have still to divine their traces; reduced to the condition of beasts of burden, they disappear from history.  Such might have been the fate of Europe if the clergy had not promptly tamed the fierce brutes to which it belonged.

Before the bishop in his gilded cope or before the monk, the converted German “emaciated, clad in skins,” wan, “dirtier and more spotted than a chameleon,"[1] stood fear-stricken as before a sorcerer.  In his calm moments, after the chase or inebriety, the vague divination of a mysterious and grandiose future, the dim conception of an unknown tribunal, the rudiment of conscience which he already had in his forests beyond the Rhine, arouses in him through sudden alarms half-formed, menacing visions.  At the moment of violating a sanctuary he asks himself whether he may not fall on its threshold with vertigo and a broken neck.[2] Convicted through his own perplexity, he stops and spares the farm, the village, and the