lm, and he is persuaded that his corporation is still an estate of
the realm, notwithstanding all that has happened. If the existing order
is regulated by the _concordat_, the existing order recognises his
corporation as a body legitimatised by the State, since it treats it on
the same terms as the magistracy and the army. If the existing order is
one based on the separation of State and Church, his corporation appears
to him still more to be an estate of the realm, because being forced
into an attitude of solid organisation, and recognising no limitations
of frontier, it becomes a collective personage which, not without peril,
but also not without a certain measure of success, has often ventured to
cross swords with the State itself.

As the priest then belongs to an order endowed with an historic
authority which is nevertheless distinct from, and in no wise a
delegation from, the authority of the people, the priest cannot fail
more or less definitely and consciously to adopt an attitude of mind
favourable to aristocracy.

The school teacher, his rival, is thrown then all the more inevitably
towards the adoption of democratic principles, and he embraces them with
a fervour into which enters jealousy quite as much as conviction. They
mean more to him than even to an eighteenth century philosopher, because
he has a much greater personal interest in believing them, the interest
of personal dislike and animosity; for it is his belief that everything
taught by the priest is the pure invention of ingenious oppressors who
wish to enslave the people in order to consolidate their own tyranny;
and that is his reason for professing philosophical ideas resuscitated
from the teaching of Diderot, and Holbach. For the school teacher it is
almost inconceivable that the priest should be anything but a rascal.

"Atheism is aristocratic," said Robespierre, thinking of Rousseau.
Atheism is democratic, say our present-day school teachers. Whence comes
this difference of opinion? First because it was fashionable among the
great lords of the eighteenth century to be libertines and
free-thinkers, but among the people the belief in God was unanimous.
Secondly, because the priests of our day, for the reasons which I have
given and from remembrance of the persecutions suffered by their Church
at the date of the first triumphs of democracy, have remained
aristocrats or have become so even more firmly than they ever were
before. Atheism then has