offered to realize in its own name the loan of four hundred millions of
francs, which was rejected, because otherwise, after having decided that
it was not the proprietor of church property, it would thus have again
been admitted to be so. It then sought every means of impeding the
operations of the municipalities. In the south, it raised catholics
against protestants; in the pulpit, it alarmed consciences; in the
confessional, it treated sales as sacrilegious, and in the tribune it
strove to render the sentiments of the assembly suspected. It excited as
much as possible religious questions for the purpose of compromising the
assembly, and confounding the cause of its own interest with that of
religion. The abuses and inutility of monastic vows were at this period
admitted by every one, even by the clergy. At their abolition on the 13th
of February, 1790, the bishop of Nancy proposed incidentally and
perfidiously that the catholic religion alone should have a public
worship. The assembly were indignant at the motives that suggested such a
proposition, and it was abandoned. But the same motion was again brought
forward in another sitting, and after stormy debates the assembly declared
that from respect to the Supreme Being and the catholic religion, the only
one supported at the expense of the state, it conceived it ought not to
decide upon the question submitted to it.

Such was the disposition of the clergy, when, in the months of June and
July, 1790, the assembly turned its attention to its internal
organization. The clergy waited with impatience for this opportunity of
exciting a schism. This project, the adoption of which caused so much
evil, went to re-establish the church on its ancient basis, and to restore
the purity of its doctrine; it was not the work of philosophers, but of
austere Christians, who wished to support religion by the state, and to
make them concur mutually in promoting its happiness. The reduction of
bishoprics to the same number as the departments, the conformity of the