Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, had neither dignity, beauty, nor convenience. Except for a few royal foundations, neither France, nor its capital, was furnished with more than the meagrest appliances of public health and charitable aid. The care of the sick, of the weak, of the destitute, of children, of the people, the emancipation of the negro—all this is essentially an idea of '89.
To sum up all these reforms we must conclude with that of the Church. The Church of France in the eighteenth century, if it were one of the most splendid and the most able, was the most arrogant and oppressive survival of the old Mediaeval Catholicism. With an army of more than 50,000 priests, and some 50,000 persons in monasteries and bound by religious vows, owning one-fifth of the soil of France, with a revenue which, in the values of to day, approached ten millions sterling, with personal, territorial, and legal privileges without number, the Gallican Church in the age of Voltaire and Diderot was a portent of pride, tyranny, and intolerance.
Protestants to death
A Church which, down to 1766, could still put Protestants to death with revolting cruelty, which is stained with the damning memories of Calas and La Barre, which was almost as corrupt as the nobility, almost as oppressive as the royalty, which added to the barbarism of the ancien regime the savage traditions of the Inquisition, which left undone all that it ought to have done, and did all that it ought not to have done — such a Church cumbered the earth. It fell, and loud and great was the crash, and fierce have been the wailings which still fill the air over its ruins guided tours istanbul.
The world has heard enough and too much of Voltaire's curse against VI fame, of Diderot's ferocious distich, how the entrails of the last priest should serve as halter to the last king. No one to-day justifies the fury of their diatribes, except by reminding the nineteenth century what it was that, in the eighteenth century, was called the Church of Christ. The Church fell, but it returned again. It revived transformed, reformed, and shorn of its pretensions. Its intolerance has been utterly stript off it. It is now but one of other endowed sects. It has less than one-fifth of its old wealth, none of its old intolerable prerogatives, and but a shadow of its old pretensions and pride.
The present essay proposes to deal with the social and political aspect of the movement of 1789, not with the wide and subtle field of the intellectual and humanitarian movement which was its prelude and spiritual director. But a short notice is needed of the principal leaders of thought by whom the social and political work was inspired. For practical purposes they may be grouped under four general heads. There was the work of destroying the old elements, and the work of constructing the new. The work was intellectual and religious on the one hand, social and political on the other.
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