because you are clownish, you are less
cunning on that account? Peasants are circumspect, often full of
cunning, and endued with an indefatigable constancy in following up any
petty interest. How many long years, what different means, and often
indirect ones, will such a one employ, in order to add two feet of land
to his field. Do you think that his son, _Monsieur le Cure_, will be
less patient or less ardent in his endeavours to get possession of a
soul, to govern this woman, or to enter that family?

These peasant families have often much vigour, a certain sap, belonging
to the blood and constitution, which either gives wit, or supplies the
place of it. Those in the South especially, where the clergy raise
their principal recruits, furnish them with intrepid speakers, who do
not need to know anything; and who, by their very ignorance, are,
perhaps, only in a more direct communication with the simple persons,
to whom they address themselves. They speak out loudly, with energy
and assurance; educated persons would be more reserved, and less proper
to fascinate the weak; they would not dare to attempt so audaciously a
clownish _Mesmerism_ in spiritual things.

In this, I must confess, there is a serious difference between our own
century and the seventeenth, when the clergy of all parties were so
learned. That culture, those vast studies, that great theological and
literary activity were, for the priest of that time, the most powerful
diversion in the midst of temptations. Science, or, at the very least,
controversy and disputation, created for him, in a position that was
often very worldly, a sort of solitude, an _alibi_, as one may say,
that effectually preserved him. But ours, who have nothing of the
sort, who, moreover, spring from a hardy and material race, and do not
know how to employ this embarrassing vigour, must indeed require a fund
of virtue!

The great men from whom we have drawn our examples, had a wonderful
defence against spiritual and carnal desires; better than a defence,
they had wings that raised them from the earth, at the critical moment,
above temptation. By these wings, I mean the love of God, the love of
genius for itself, its natural effort to remain on high and ascend, its
abhorrence of degradation.

Being chiefs of the clergy of France, the only clergy then flourishing,
and responsible to the world for whatever subsisted by their faith,
they kept their hearts exalted to the level