She stood in the nave unnoticed in her black dress without ornament, and saw the little girl go up in white and veiled to the altar-rails. There was no one there. Never since Constantine had the Faith been lower in France; but the Faith is a thing for the individual mind and not for majorities.
They went back homewards. They gave alms.
Meanwhile, though this was her true life for those months, one must speak of what went on without: the rising of the Revolutionary song and the noises at her feet. For out of this swelling energy and increasing peril was to grow her experiment of an alliance with the virile brain of Mirabeau.
There stands, side by side with the activity of mortal life, a silent thing commonly unseen and, even if seen, despised. It has no name, unless its name be religion: its form is the ritual of the altar; its philosophy is despised under the title of Theology. This thing and its influence should least of all appear in the controversies of a high civilisation. With an irony that every historian of whatever period must have noted a hundred times, this thing and its influence perpetually intervene, when most society is rational and when most it is bent upon positive things; and now at the moment when the transformation of society towards such better things seemed so easy and the way so plain, now in late ’89, before any threat had come from the King or any danger of dissolution from within, this thing, this influence, entered unnoticed by a side-door; it was weak and almost dumb. It and it alone halted and still halts all the Revolutionary work, for it should have been recognised and it was not. It demanded its place and no place was given it. There is a divine pride about it and, as it were, a divine necessity of vengeance. Religion, if it be slighted, if it be misunderstood, will implacably destroy.
It was the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1789, one of those fatal and recurrent dates to which her history is pinned, which saw the sowing of that seed and the little entry of what was to become the major and perhaps the unending feud of our modern democracies.
The clergy of the French Church were then national to a degree hitherto unknown in the history of the Church in any of her provinces. The national movement swept them all. The Episcopacy represented, in some few of the greatest sees, the Revolutionary enthusiasms, in the mass of bishops the resistance to the Revolution which was exactly parallel to the attitude of the lay nobility. The parish clergy reflected with exact fidelity the homogeneous will of the nation. It was a priest who furnished the notes of the Revolutionary movement in the capital of Normandy. Later it was a priest who wrote the last (and the only literary) stanza of the Marseillaise. Even the religious, or what was left of them (for monastic life had never fallen to a lower state or one more dead since first St. Martin had brought it into Gaul), met the movement in a precisely similar fashion, suspected it in proportion to their privilege or their wealth, welcomed it in proportion to their knowledge of the people and their mixing with them. It was the poor remnant of the Dominicans of Paris that received and housed and gave its name to the headquarters of pure democracy, the Jacobins.
The clergy, then, were but the nation. The long campaign against the Faith, which had so long been the business of the Huguenot, the Deist, the Atheist, and the Jew, had indeed brought the Faith very near to death, and, as has so often been insisted in the course of these pages, it is difficult for a modern man to conceive how tiny was the little flickering flame of Catholicism in the generation before the Revolution, for he is used to it to-day as a great combative advancing thing against which every effort of its enemies’ energies must be actively and constantly used. The clergy as a body of men were national and willing to aid the nation; the Faith, which should have been their peculiar business, had almost gone—therefore it was that to put to national uses what seemed the grossly exaggerated endowments of religion seemed a national policy in that embarrassed time. Therefore it was that the endowments so attacked could ill defend themselves, for the philosophy of their defence, which lay in their religion, was forgotten. Obviously necessary and patriotic as the policy seemed, it awoke that influence of which I speak, which does not reside in men and which is greater than men, which only acts through men, but is not of them; and Religion—seemingly all but dead—rose at once when it felt upon it the gesture of the civil power.
It was, I have said, the 2nd of November, the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, that the vote was taken upon the confiscation of religious endowments. The light was failing as that vote began. The candelabra of the great riding-school were lit, and it was full darkness before the vote was ended, for five-sixths of all possible votes were cast and nearly one thousand men voted each to the call of his name upon a roll. When the figures were read, a majority of 222 had decided the thing, and, in deciding it, had determined the dual fortunes of Europe thenceforward to our own time. The Revolution, a thing inconceivable apart from the French inheritance of Catholic Dogma, had raised an issue against the Catholic Church. For three weeks had the matter been debated; the days of October had launched it, and while yet the Parliament was in Versailles a bishop—one later to be famous under his own name of Talleyrand—had moved in favour of that Act.
It was a simple plan, and to see how immediate and necessary it seemed we have but to read the figures of the clerical funds and of their iniquitous distribution; yet it failed altogether and had for its effect only one effect much larger than any one dreamt—the creation of enmity in the only Thing that could endure, indefinitely opposed to the Revolution, mobile, vigorous, and with a life as long or longer than its own.