The philosophers of the Constituent Assembly receded before the difficulties of this labour. Instead of an emancipation, they made a compact with the power of the clergy, the dreaded influences of the court of Rome, and the inveterate habits of the people. They contented themselves with relaxing the chain which bound the state to the church. Their duty was to have snapped it asunder. The throne was chained to the altar, they desired to chain the altar to the throne. It was only displacing tyranny,--oppressing conscience by law instead of oppressing the law by conscience. The civil constitution of the clergy was the expression of this reciprocal false position. The clergy was deprived of these endowments in landed estates, which decimated property and population in France. They deprived it of its benefices, its abbeys, and its tithes--the altar's feudality. It received in lieu an endowment in salaries levied on the taxes. As the condition of this arrangement, which gave to the working clergy an existence, influence, and a powerful body of ministers of worship paid by the state, they required the clergy to take the oath of the constitution. This constitution comprised articles which affected the spiritual supremacy and administrative privileges of the court of Rome. Catholicism became alarmed and protested; consciences were disturbed. The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful. Amongst the bishops and the priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their existence; others refused, or, after having taken it, retracted. This gave rise to trouble in many minds, agitation in consciences, division in the temples. The great majority of parishes had two ministers,--the one a constitutional priest, salaried and protected by the government, the other refractory, refusing the oath, deprived of his income, driven from the church, and raising altar opposing altar in some clandestine chapel, or in the open field. These two ministers of the same worship excommunicated each other, the one in the name of the constitution, and the other in the name of the Pope and of the church. The population was also divided according to the greater or lesser degree of revolutionary spirit prevailing in the province. In cities and the more enlightened districts the constitutional worship was exercised almost without dispute. In the open country and the less civilised departments, the priest who had not taken the oath became a consecrated tribune, who at the foot of the altar, or in the elevation of the pulpit, agitated the people and inspired it, in all the horror of a constitutional and schismatic priesthood, with hatred of the government which protected it. This was not actually persecution or civil war, but the sure prelude to both.