ree causes of uneasiness agitated men's minds at the moment when the
Assembly opened its sittings--the clergy, emigration, and impending war.

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