The wealth of the clergy was enormous. Almsgiving, which has filled Europe with beggary, has ever been represented by the Catholic Church as the first act of piety. During long ages of superstition, the dying had been induced, as an atonement for godless lives, to bequeath their possessions to the Church, to be dispensed in charity to the people. Thus many a wealthy sinner had obtained absolution, and thus the ecclesiastics held endowments which comprised one fifth of the lands of the kingdom, and were estimated at four thousand millions of francs ($800,000,000).[240] Notwithstanding this immense opulence of the Church, nearly all the parish pastors, the hard and faithful workers for Christianity--and there were many such, men of true lives and of unfeigned religion--were in the extreme of poverty. The bishops were all _nobles_, for even Louis XVI. would elect no other. These bishops were often the most dissolute and voluptuous of men, and reveled in incomes of a million of francs ($250,000) a year. The working clergy, on the contrary, who were from the people, seldom received more than two hundred francs ($40) a year. They were so poor as to be quite dependent upon their parishioners for charity.[241] The Assembly assumed that these treasures had been intrusted to the Church for the benefit of the people; that the luxurious ecclesiastics, by unfaithfulness to their trust, had forfeited the right of farther dispensing the charity. After a very fierce strife, a motion was made by Mirabeau, that the possessions of the Church were _at the disposal_ of the state. Many of the lower clergy voted for the resolution, and it was adopted by a majority of 568 against 346. Forty deputies refused to vote. This measure placed at once immense resources in the hands of the Assembly, and necessarily exasperated tenfold the privileged classes, and rolled a wave of alarm over the whole wide-spread domain of the Pope. It was the signal for Catholic Europe to rise in arms against the Revolution. As it was impossible, under the pressure of the times, to force the sale of the enormous property of the Church without an immense sacrifice, bonds were issued, called _assignats_, assigned or secured on this church property. Thus was the haughty Gallican Church deprived of its ill-gotten and worse used wealth. The dignitaries of this Church had ever been the most inveterate foes of popular elevation. Treasure which had been wrested from the poor and extorted from the dying, as a gift to God for the promotion of human virtue, they were using to forge chains for the people, and were squandering in shameless profligacy.