h them to the
extremity of crime against their country? The nation supports them: is
not that enough? They appeal to the article of the constitution, which
says, 'The salaries of the ministers of Catholic worship form a portion
of the national debt.' Are they ministers of the Catholic worship? Does
the state recognise any other Catholicity than its own? If they would
attempt any other it is open to them and their sectarians! The nation
allows all sorts of worship, but only pays one. And what a saving for
the nation to be freed from thirty millions (of francs), which she pays
annually to her most implacable enemies! (Bravo.) Why have we these
phalanx of priests, who have abjured their ministry? these legions of
canons and monks; these cohorts of abbes, friars, and beneficed clergy
of all sorts, who were not remarkable otherwise, except for their
pretensions, inutility, intrigues and licentious life; and are only so
to-day by their vindictive interference, their schemes, their unwearied
hatred of the Revolution? Why should we pay this army of dependents from
the funds of the nation? What do they do? They preach emigration, they
send coin from the realm, they foment conspiracies against us from
within and without. Go, say they to the nobility, and combine your
attacks with the foreigner; let blood flow in streams, provided that we
recover our privileges! This is their church! If hell had one on earth
it is thus that it would speak. Who shall say we ought to endow it?"

Tourne, the constitutional bishop of Bourges, replied to the Abbe
Fauchet as Fenelon would have answered Bossuet. He proved that, in the
mouth of his adversary, toleration was fanatical and cruel. "You have
proposed to you violent remedies for the evils which anger can only
envenom; it is a sentence of starvation which is demanded of you against
our nonjuring brethren. Simple religious errors should be strangers to
the legislator. The priests are not guilty--they are only led astray.
When the eye of the law falls on these errors of the conscience, it
envenoms them. The best means of curing them is not to see them. To
punish by the pangs of hunger simple and venial errors, would be an
opprobrium to legislation--a horror in morals. The legislator leaves to
God the care of avenging his own glory, if he believe it violated by an
indecorous worship. Would you, in the name of tolerance, again create an
inquisition which would not have, like the other, the excuse of