Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/596

582 pay consciences that urge their possessors to the ruin of their country? What a saving of thirty millions of francs which the nation pays annually to her most implacable enemies! "Why have we this phalanx of priests who have abjured their ministry?—these legions of canons and monks; these cohorts of abbés, friars, and beneficed clergy of all sorts, who are not remarkable except for their pretensions, inutility, intrigues, and licentious lives; or, as now, by their vindictive interference, their schemes, their unwearied hatred of the revolution?



Why should we pay these men to preach emigration? to send coin from the realm? to foment conspiracies against us both from within and from without? Go, say they to the nobility, combine your attacks with the foreigners; let blood flow in streams, provided we recover our privileges. This is their church! Who shall say that we ought to endow it?"

Tourné, the constitutional bishop of Bourges, replied to Fauchet with more tolerance. He contended that the priests were not guilty, they were only led astray by their peculiar ideas of the church and of government; that to punish them by a proscription of hunger, was not to enlighten them or their hearers, but only to envenom