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Rh which, while reducing the income of prelates, improved the situation of the parish clergy. The effect was not what he intended, for he did not save the public credit, and he ruined the Gallican Church. The Assembly would neither leave the patronage to the executive, nor salary a body of men to be nominated by the Pope. It therefore adopted the principle of election, which was the substance of the Constitution Civile. In questions of Canon Law, ancient or modern, Talleyrand was neither competent nor interested. The scheme was not of his devising, but it was executed by his instrumentality ; he consecrated the first of the new bishops. Writing amid the environments of 1816, he states his reason. Nearly all the bishops had refused the Constitutional oath. If none had accepted, and if there had, consequently, been nobody to transmit the succession, the State might have lapsed into Presbyterianism, which was a form that harmonised with the spirit of the new institutions, and Calvinism would have been established. This far-fetched argument may have been a genuine reminiscence of Bossuet, and of the doctrine familiar to Gallican divines, that a Huguenot is a Republican, that a Presbyterian is the same as a Whig, and that hierarchy in the Church responds to monarchy in the State.

It may be that the bishop employed schism as a supreme preservative against Democratic heresy. The establishment of the new episcopate gave him a welcome opportunity of abandoning his position in the Church and seeking a new career. There was no French abbé on whom his orders sat more lightly, or who was so secular in his conduct. But though he wore no mask of hypocrisy, and submitted to little restraint, when he could not win twelve hundreds at play without being made the talk of the town, the falseness of his position became intolerable. He resigned his bishopric, and refused to have himself put forward for the See of Paris. Three years later, when, riding at night in an American forest, he called out to his servant, and a voice answered, "Here I am, Monseigneur," he could not help laughing at this reminder of distant