Under the _ancien régime_, the disadvantages of an Establishment produced a strong party of liberal Catholics prepared for a radical change in the relations between Church and State. It was this party which organized that remarkable Constitutional Church, at once Republican and Catholic, which sustained Religion through the Reign of Terror, and which Pope Pius VII and Napoleon I combined to overthrow. My object in writing this story is to illustrate the currents of feeling in the State and Church of France in 1789, currents not altogether unlike those now circulating in our own. It was my good fortune, during a recent visit to Normandy, to collect materials for a history of a representative character of that eventful period,--one Thomas Lindet, parish priest of Bernay. In writing his story, I do not present him to the reader as a model. He had great faults; but one can forgive much on account of his enthusiastic love of justice, and faith in his cause. That my story may be taken to convey a moral, is possible. But let me disclaim any intention of preaching a lesson to the aristocracy; I believe that they do not need it. In France, the crown supported the nobility; in England, the nobility support the crown. The French aristocracy was a privileged class, exempt from the burden of taxation. In England, the heaviest burden falls on the holders of landed property. With us, the privileged class is that of the manufacturer and trader. The French nobility never made common cause with the people against the encroachments of the royal prerogative. The English barons wrung Magna Charta from reluctant John. Henry VIII would never have been able to consolidate the power in his despotic hands, had not the civil wars of the Roses broken the strength of the aristocracy. Since then the nobility have made the cause of right and liberty their own, and a limited monarchy is the result. The moral, if moral there must be, is this: In times when the relations between Church and State are precarious, coercive measures are certain to force on a rupture. Of late, repression has been employed freely on a portion of the community, and this has suddenly created a liberation party which three years ago scarcely existed within the Church and the ranks of the clergy. The English curate is as much at the mercy of the Bishop as was, and is still, the French curé; and this he has been made painfully aware of. In the Wesleyan revival, a body of earnest men who moved for a relaxation of the icy bonds of Establishmentarianism were thrust forth into schism. The first Tractarians were driven to Rome by the hardness of their spiritual rulers. At present, a party, peculiarly narrow, and rapidly dying, by means of a packed Privy Council, are engaged in hunting out and repressing the most active section of the Church.