CHAPTER XX. 275

PREFACE.

There is a side to the History of the French Revolution which is too generally overlooked--its ecclesiastical side.

Under the _ancien régime_, the disadvantages of an Establishment produced a strong party of liberal Catholics prepared for a radical change in the relations between Church and State.

It was this party which organized that remarkable Constitutional Church, at once Republican and Catholic, which sustained Religion through the Reign of Terror, and which Pope Pius VII and Napoleon I combined to overthrow.

My object in writing this story is to illustrate the currents of feeling in the State and Church of France in 1789, currents not altogether unlike those now circulating in our own. It was my good fortune, during a recent visit to Normandy, to collect materials for a history of a representative character of that eventful period,--one Thomas Lindet, parish priest of Bernay. In writing his story, I do not present him to the reader as a model. He had great faults; but one can forgive much on account of his enthusiastic love of justice, and faith in his cause.

That my story may be taken to convey a moral, is possible. But let me disclaim any intention of preaching a lesson to the aristocracy; I believe that they do not need it. In France, the crown supported the nobility; in England, the nobility support the crown. The French aristocracy was a privileged class, exempt from the burden of taxation. In England, the heaviest burden falls on the holders of landed property. With us, the privileged class is that of the manufacturer and trader. The French nobility never made common cause with the people against the encroachments of the royal prerogative. The English barons wrung Magna Charta from reluctant John. Henry VIII would never have been able to consolidate the power in his despotic hands, had not the civil wars of the Roses broken the strength of the aristocracy. Since then the nobility have made the cause of right and liberty their own, and a limited monarchy is the result.

The moral, if moral there must be, is this: In times when the relations between Church and State are precarious, coercive measures are certain to force on a rupture.

Of late, repression has been employed freely on a portion of the community, and this has suddenly created a liberation party which three years ago scarcely existed within the Church and the ranks of the clergy.

The English curate is as much at the mercy of the Bishop as was, and is still, the French curé; and this he has been made painfully aware of.

In the Wesleyan revival, a body of earnest men who moved for a relaxation of the icy bonds of Establishmentarianism were thrust forth into schism. The first Tractarians were driven to Rome by the hardness of their spiritual rulers. At present, a party, peculiarly narrow, and rapidly dying, by means of a packed Privy Council, are engaged in hunting out and repressing the most active section of the Church.

Worship is the language of conviction. To a large and rapidly increasing body of Anglicans, Christ is not, as He is to Protestants, a mere historical personage, the founder of Christianity, but is the centre of a religious system, the ever-present object of adoration for His people. A passionate love of Christ has floreated into splendour of worship. To curtail liberty of worship is to touch the rights of conscience; and to interfere with them has ever led to disastrous consequences--such is the verdict of History.

A feverish eagerness to dissever Church and State has broken out among clergy and laity, and a schism would be the result, were the chain uniting Church and State indissoluble; but, as events of late years have made it clear, that with a little concerted energy the old rust-eaten links can be snapped, there will be no schism, but a united effort will be made by a body of resolute spirits within the Church to tear asunder crown and mitre. The disestablishment of the English Church will present a future absent from that of the Irish Church. In the latter case, there was an unanimous opposition to the measure by all within it; but, in the event of the severance of the union in England, it will take place amid the joyous acclamations of no inconsiderable section of its best and truest sons.

If, from the following pages, it appears that my sympathies are with the National Assembly, and those who upset the _ancien régime_, it does not follow that they are with the Revolution in its excesses. The true principles of the Revolution are embodied in the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man. ‘Write at the head of that Declaration the name of God’ said Grégoire; ‘or you establish rights without duties, which is but another thing for proclaiming force to be supreme.’ The Assembly refused. Grégoire was right.

Robespierre, Danton, and his clique made force supreme--as supreme as in the days of the Monarchy, and trampled on the rights, to protect which they had been raised into power.

A Republic is one thing: the despotism of an Autocracy or of a Democracy is another thing.

I propose following up this historical romance by a life of the Abbé Grégoire, which will illustrate the position of the Constitutional Church, of which he was the soul.

I have chosen the form of fiction for this sketch, as it best enables me to exhibit the state of feeling in France in 1788 and 1789. That is no fiction; the incidents related and the characters introduced are, for the most part, true to History.

S. B-G.

DALTON, THIRSK, _March 25th, 1870_.

IN EXITU ISRAEL.