al property may be made the Nation's, and the Clergy hired
servants of the State; but if so, is it not an altered Church?
Adjustment enough, of the most confused sort, has become unavoidable.
Old landmarks, in any sense, avail not in a new France. Nay literally,
the very Ground is new divided; your old party-coloured Provinces become
new uniform Departments, Eighty-three in number;--whereby, as in some
sudden shifting of the Earth's axis, no mortal knows his new latitude at
once. The Twelve old Parlements too, what is to be done with them? The
old Parlements are declared to be all 'in permanent vacation,'--till
once the new equal-justice, of Departmental Courts, National
Appeal-Court, of elective Justices, Justices of Peace, and other
Thouret-and-Duport apparatus be got ready. They have to sit there, these
old Parlements, uneasily waiting; as it were, with the rope round their
neck; crying as they can, Is there none to deliver us? But happily the
answer being, None, none, they are a manageable class, these Parlements.
They can be bullied, even into silence; the Paris Parliament, wiser
than most, has never whimpered. They will and must sit there; in such
vacation as is fit; their Chamber of Vacation distributes in the interim
what little justice is going. With the rope round their neck, their
destiny may be succinct! On the 13th of November 1790, Mayor Bailly
shall walk to the Palais de Justice, few even heeding him; and with
municipal seal-stamp and a little hot wax, seal up the Parlementary
Paper-rooms,--and the dread Parlement of Paris pass away, into Chaos,
gently as does a Dream! So shall the Parlements perish, succinctly; and
innumerable eyes be dry.

Not so the Clergy. For granting even that Religion were dead; that it
had died, half-centuries ago, with unutterable Dubois; or emigrated
lately, to Alsace, with Necklace-Cardinal Rohan; or that it now walked
as goblin revenant with Bishop Talleyrand of Autun; yet does not the
Shadow of Religion, the Cant of Religion, still linger? The Clergy have
means and material: means, of number, organization, social weight; a
material, at lowest, of public ignorance, known to be the mother of
devotion. Nay, withal, is it incredible that there might, in simple
hearts, latent here and there like gold grains in the mud-beach, still
dwell some real Faith in God, of so singular and tenacious a sort that
even a Maury or a Talleyrand, could still be the symbol for it?--Enough,
and Cler