The intimate hold of the chief on his men was relaxed or broken. His
ascendency over them was no longer sufficiently great; they no longer
had confidence in him. His subordinates had come to regard him as he
was, a privileged individual, sprung from a another stock and
furnished by a class apart, bishop by right of birth, without a
prolonged apprenticeship, having rendered no services, without tests
of merit, almost an interloper in the body of his clergy, a Church
parasite accustomed to spending the revenues of his diocese away from
his diocese, idle and ostentatious, often a shameless gallant or
obnoxious hunter, disposed to be a philosopher and free-thinker, and
who lacked two qualifications for a leader of Christian priests:
first, ecclesiastical deportment, and next, and very often, Christian
faith.[46]

All these gaps in and discrepancies of episcopal character, all these
differences and distances (which existed before 1789), between the
origins, interests, habits, and manners of the lower and the upper
clergy, all these inequalities and irregularities which alienated
inferiors from the superior, have disappeared; the modern régime has
leveled the wall of separation established by the ancient régime
between the bishop and his priests. At the present day he is, like
them, a plebeian, of common extraction, and sometimes very low, one
being the son of a village shoemaker, another the natural son of a
poor workwoman, both being men of feeling and never blushing at their
humble origin, openly tender and respectful to their mothers, - a
certain bishop lodging his mother, formerly a servant, in his
episcopal palace and giving her the first seat at his table among the
most honored and noblest of his guests.[47] He is "one of fortune's
officers," that is to say, a meritorious and old officer.[48]
According the "Almanac" of 1889, the three youngest are from forty-