properties, your honour, and yet you deliberate!" Mirabeau had carried
away the assembly by his oratory; and the patriotic contribution was voted
with unanimous applause.

But this resource had only afforded momentary relief. The finances of the
revolution depended on a more daring and more vast measure. It was
necessary not only to support the revolution, but to repair the immense
deficit which stopped its progress, and threatened its future destiny. One
way alone remained--to declare ecclesiastical property national, and to
sell it for the rescue of the state. Public interest prescribed this
course; and it could be done with justice, the clergy not being the
proprietors, but the simple administrators of this property, devoted to
religion, and not to the priests. The nation, therefore, by taking on
itself the expenses of the altar, and the support of its ministers might
procure and appropriate an important financial resource, and obtain a
great political result.

It was important not to leave an independent body, and especially an
ancient body, any longer in the state; for in a time of revolution
everything ancient is hostile. The clergy, by its formidable hierarchy and
its opulence, a stranger to the new changes, would have remained as a
republic in the kingdom. Its form belonged to another system: when there
was no state, but only bodies, each order had provided for its own
regulation and existence. The clergy had its decretals, the nobility its
law of fiefs, the people its corporations; everything was independent,
because everything was private. But now that functions were becoming
public, it was necessary to make a magistracy of the priesthood as they
had made one of royalty; and, in order to make them dependent on the
state, it was essential they should be paid by it, and to resume from the
monarch his domains, from the clergy its property, by bestowing on each of