72]
except the resident seignior and some man of the law or half-way
schoolmaster, was at all learned.[4173] Actually, for a man who had
finished his studies and knowing Latin, to consent, for six hundred
francs or three hundred francs a year, to live isolated, and a celibate,
almost in indigence, amongst rustics and the poor, he must be a priest;
the quality of his office makes him resigned to the discomforts of his
situation. A preacher of the Word, a professor of morality, a minister
of Charity, a guide and dispenser of spiritual life, he taught a theory
of the world, at once consoling and self-denying, which he enforced with
a cult, and this cult was the only one adapted to his flock; manifestly,
the French, especially those devoted to manual and hard labor, could not
regard this world as ideal, except through his formulas; history, the
supreme judge, had on this point rendered its verdict without appeal;
no heresy, no schism, not the Reformation nor Jansenism, had prevailed
against hereditary faith; through infinitely multiplied and deeply
penetrating roots this faith suited national customs, temperament, and
peculiar social imagination and sensibility. Possessing the heart, the
intellect, and even the senses, through fixed, immemorial traditions and
habits, it had become an unconscious, almost corporeal necessity, and
the Catholic orthodox cure, in communion with the Pope, was about as
indispensable to the village as the public fountain; he also quenched
thirst, the thirst of the soul; without him, the inhabitants could find
no drinkable water. And, if we keep human weaknesses in mind, it may
be said that nobleness of character in the clergy corresponded with
nobleness of profession; in all points no one could dispute their
capacity for self-sacrifice, for they willingly suffered for what they
believed to be the truth. If, in 1790, a number of priests took the oath
to the civil constitution of the clergy, it was with reservations, or
because they deemed the oath licit; but, after the dismissal of the
bishops and the Pope's disapprobation, many of them withdrew it at the
risk of their lives, so as not to fall into schism; they fell back into
the ranks and gave themselves up voluntarily to the brutality of
the crowd and the rigors of the law. Moreover, and from the start,
notwithstanding threats and temptations, two-thirds of the clergy would
not take the oath; in the highest ranks, among the mundane ecclesiastics
wh