vicar, "finding evil only in injustice and in a lack of charity," and considering religion merely as a political institution and for moral ends. I might cite many others, like M. de Grimaldi, the young and gallant bishop of Le Mans, who selects young and gallant comrades of his own station for his grand vicars, and who has a rendezvous for pretty women at his country seat at Coulans[4230]. Judge of their faith by their habits. In other cases we have no difficulty in determining. Scepticism is notorious with the Cardinal de Rohan, with M. de Brienne, archbishop of Sens, with M. de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, and with the Abbé Maury, defender of the clergy. Rivarol,[4231] himself a skeptic, declares that at the approach of the Revolution, "the enlightenment of the clergy equaled that of the philosophers." "Who would believe it, but body with the fewest prejudices," says Mercier,[4232] "is the clergy." And the Archbishop of Narbonne, explaining the resistance of the upper class of the clergy in 1791 [4233] attributes it, not to faith but to a point of honor. "We conducted ourselves at that time like true gentlemen, for, with most of us, it could not be said that it was through religious feeling." V. Political Opposition. Progress of political opposition.--Its origin.--The economists and the parliamentarians.--They prepare the way for the philosophers.--Political fault-finding in the drawing-rooms.--Female liberalism. The distance between the altar and the throne is a short one, and yet it requires thirty years for opinion to overcome it. No political or social attacks are yet made during the first half of the century. The irony of the "Lettres Persanes"is as cautious as it is delicate, and the "Esprit des Lois" is conservative. As to the Abbé de Saint-Pierre his reveries provoke a smile, and when he undertakes to censure Louis XIV the Academy strikes him off its list. At last, the economists on one side and the parliamentarians on the other, give the signal.--Voltaire says[4234] that "about 1750 the nation, satiated with verse, tragedies, comedies, novels, operas, romantic histories, and still more romantic moralizings, and with disputes about grace and convulsions, began to discuss the question of corn." What makes bread dear? Why is the laborer so miserable? What constitutes the material and limits of taxation? Ought not all land to pay taxes, and should one piece pay more than its net product? These are the questions that find their way into drawing-rooms under the king's auspices, by means of Quesnay, his physician, "his thinker," the founder of a system which aggrandizes the sovereign to relieve the people, and which multiplies the number of tax-payers to lighten the burden of taxation.--At the same time, through the opposite door, other questions enter, not less novel. "Is France[4235] a mild and representative monarchy or a government of the Turkish stamp? Are