But subsequently, their language and their conduct sensibly changed, and their exactions increased from year to year, particularly when the law had declared that there were Protestants in the kingdom no longer. “Take heed,” the priests said; “we cannot administer the sacraments to false brethren; this would be an abominable profanation. We must have long and severe proofs, instructions of six months, a year’s, two years’ duration, solemn oaths; in short, a complete certainty that you are true and faithful Catholics. Otherwise, we will not celebrate your marriages, nor give you certificates of Catholicity, and you may maintain your civil rights as best you can.”
This alteration, continually more marked, is naturally explained by the disastrous defeats the priests had suffered since the Revocation. They imagined that the demolition of the places of worship, the banishment of the pastors, the deprivation of all regular instruction, the want of a religion, the legal duty of performing acts of Catholicity, would restore true believers to the Church, at least in the second generation. But their expectation had been deceived, particularly with regard to the country people and the industrial classes. Children and grandchildren hated the (Roman) Catholic church as much as their fathers; and they regarded the curates with no less detestation and contempt.
Tired of acting so miserable a part, they resolved to administer the sacraments to none but the most undoubted (Roman) Catholics, and they were perfectly right; but they should then have disavowed and rejected the intervention of physical constraint, which they did not. They persisted in calling for rigour, as if they were satisfied with appearances, and to exact positive proofs of religion, as if they employed rigour no longer! A more enormous and detestable contradiction has never been witnessed![116]
Then, having arrived at this degree of inconsequence, the clergy came into collision with the magistracy, and this is a new phase of the question, which it is important to understand; for all the remainder of this history until 1787 is involved in it.
If the councillors of the Parliaments, and the magistrates generally, exhibited severity against the Reformed, they always implied that the priests should administer the sacraments without exacting excessive proofs. From the reign of Louis XIV., their decrees might be interpreted in the following manner:—“We are absolutely determined that your marriages shall be blessed by a priest, and that your children shall be presented for Catholic baptism; otherwise, you shall have no civil status; your unions shall be illegal, and your children shall be attainted with illegitimacy; in certain cases, even, you shall forfeit your property and be condemned to the galleys. But reassure yourselves, we will require nothing but simple formalities. It is agreed that the clergy shall impose nothing else, and we will abide by it.”
Relying upon these maxims, the Protestants conceived that they were authorized in conceding to the priests as little as possible; but the latter replied,—“The opinion of the judges is nothing to us. The clergy alone have the light of deciding in sacramental matters. No human power can compel us to give them to those whom we think unworthy. Attend the mass and our instructions for years; confess yourselves regularly; show yourselves, in a word, to be faithful Catholics, and you shall participate in the favours of the Church; otherwise you shall not.”
Strange spectacle! The judge insisted upon the execution of the laws, because he interpreted them in one sense, and the priest applied them in another. The first was only solicitous for civil unity; the latter was anxious above all things for spiritual unity. One only obliged the Protestants to be (Roman) Catholics outwardly; the other used the sentence to force them to be so internally. To such an anomalous state of things had these edicts given birth, which had ceased to correspond with the general conscience of the epoch. Even the (Roman) Catholics themselves, it is well known, had analogous conflicts in respect of the refusal of the sacraments to the Jesuits, and the certificates of confession. The only solution of the problem lay in the mutual independence, that is now proclaimed in all the constitutions, of the civil and the religious state.
The Baron de Breteuil shows, in a memorial addressed to Louis XVI., the inextricable embarrassment that had arisen with regard to the Protestants. He says: “On one side, there is the absolute necessity of the certificate of Catholicity; on the other, a scrupulous and arbitrary examination before granting this certificate. What else than laws of impossible execution could result from all these confused ideas, from all these incoherent and contradictory dispositions?... These unfortunate people, alike rejected by our tribunals under one name, and repulsed by our churches under another name, unrecognised at the same time as Calvinists, and unrecognised as converts, wholly unable to obey laws which oppose each other, and thereby destitute of every means of proving, either before a priest or before a judge, the evidence of their births, their marriages, and their burials, are cut off, as it were, from the family of mankind.”[117]
The illustrious Chancellor d’Aguesseau has stated the dilemma in a very perfect manner. “Either the Church must relax its rigour by some modification, or if the Church does not think it ought to do so, it must cease to importune the king to use his authority to reduce his subjects to an impossibility, by commanding them to fulfil a religious duty, which the Church will not permit them to discharge.”