the reign of opinion, from custom to principle, led to a
new order through confusion, uncertainty, and suspense.
The efficacy of the coming system was nowhere felt at
first The soldiers, who were so soon to form the finest
army ever known, ran away as soon as they saw a shot
fired. The prosperous finances of modern France began
with bankruptcy. But in one division of public life the
Revolution not only made a bad beginning, but went on,
step by step, to a bad end, until, by civil war and anarchy
and tyranny, it had ruined its cause. The majority of the
clergy were true to the new ideas, and on some decisive
occasions, June 19 and August 4, promoted their victory.
Many prelates were enlightened reformers, and even
Robespierre believed that the inferior clergy were, in the
bulk, democratic. Nevertheless the Assembly, by a series
of hostile measures, carefully studied, and long pursued,
turned them into implacable enemies, and thereby made the
Revolution odious to a large part of the French people.
This gradual but determined change of front, improbable at first, and evidently impolitic, is the true cause of the disastrous conflict in which the movement of 1789 came to ruin. Had there been no ecclesiastical establishment to deal with, it may be that the development of Jacobin theory, or the logic of socialism, would have led to the same result. As it was, they were secondary causes of the catastrophe that was to follow. That there was a fund of active animosity for the church, in a generation tutored by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Holbach, Rousseau and Raynal, none could doubt. But in the men of more immediate influence, such as Turgot, Mirabeau and Sieyès, contempt was more visible than resentment; and it was by slow degrees that the full force of aversion predominated over liberal feeling and tolerant profession. But if the liberal tendency had been stronger, and tolerant convictions more distinct, there were many reasons which made a collision inevitable between the Church and the prevailing ideas. The Gallican Church had been closely associated with the entire order of things which the Assembly, at all costs, was resolved to destroy. For three
