orporals.[5243] Command, from such
a lofty grade falls direct, with extraordinary force, on grades so low,
and, at the first stroke, is followed by passive obedience. Discipline
in a diocese is as perfect as in an army corps, and the prelates
publicly take pride in it. "It is an insult," said Cardinal de
Bonnechose to the Senate,[5244] "to suppose that we are not masters
in our own house, that we cannot direct our clergy, and that it is the
clergy which directs us... There is no general within its walls who
would accept the reproach that could not compel the obedience of
his soldiers. Each of us has command of a regiment, and the regiment
marches."

III. The new Bishop.

Change in the habits and ways of the bishop.--His origin,
age, capability, mode of living, labor, initiative,
undertakings, and moral and social ascendancy. [5245]

In order to make troops march, a staff, even a croisier, is not enough;
to compulsory subordination voluntary subordination must be added;
therefore, legal authority in the chief should be accompanied with moral
authority; otherwise he will not be loyally supported and to the end.
In 1789, this was not the case with the bishop; on two occasions, and at
two critical moments, the clergy of the inferior order formed a separate
band, at first at the elections, by selecting for deputies cures and not
prelates, and next in the national assembly, by abandoning the prelates
to unite with the Third Estate. The intimate hold of the chief on
his men was relaxed or broken. His ascendency over them was no
longer sufficiently great; they no longer had confidence in him. His
subordinates had come to regard him as he was, a privileged individual,
sprung from a another stock and furnished by a class apart, bishop by
right of birth, without a prolonged apprenticeship, having rendered no
services, without tests of merit, almost an interloper in the body of
his clergy, a Church parasite accustomed to spending the revenues of his
diocese away from his diocese, idle and ostentatious, often a
shameless gallant or obnoxious hunter, disposed to be a philosopher
and free-thinker, and who lacked two qualifications for a leader of
Christian priests: first, ecclesiastical deportment, and next, and very
often, Christian faith.[5246]

All these gaps in and discrepancies of episcopal character, all these
differences and distances (which existed before 1789), between the
origins, interests, habits,