[71] - Lastly, remark the distribution of the
clergy over the territory. There was a cur? or vicar in the smallest
of the forty thousand villages. In thousands of small, poor, remote
communes, he was the only man who could readily read and write; none
other than he in many of the larger rural communes,[72] except the
resident seignior and some man of the law or half-way schoolmaster,
was at all learned.[73] Actually, for a man who had finished his
studies and knowing Latin, to consent, for six hundred francs or three
hundred francs a year, to live isolated, and a celibate, almost in
indigence, amongst rustics and the poor, he must be a priest; the
quality of his office makes him resigned to the discomforts of his
situation. A preacher of the Word, a professor of morality, a
minister of Charity, a guide and dispenser of spiritual life, he
taught a theory of the world, at once consoling and self-denying,
which he enforced with a cult, and this cult was the only one adapted
to his flock; manifestly, the French, especially those devoted to
manual and hard labor, could not regard this world as ideal, except
through his formulas; history, the supreme judge, had on this point
rendered its verdict without appeal; no heresy, no schism, not the
Reformation nor Jansenism, had prevailed against hereditary faith;
through infinitely multiplied and deeply penetrating roots this faith
suited national customs, temperament, and peculiar social imagination
and sensibility.
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