"Your aim was to destroy ecclesiastical orders,[2254] because their destruction was essential to the safety of the State. If the clergy preserve their property, the clerical order is not destroyed: you necessarily leave it the right of assembling; you sanction its independence." In no case must ecclesiastics hold possessions. "If they are proprietors they are independent, and if they are independent they will associate this independence with the exercise of their functions." The clergy, cost what it will, must be in the hands of the State, as simple functionaries and supported by its subsidies. It would be too dangerous for a nation, "to admit in its bosom as proprietors a large body of men to whom so many sources of credit already give so great power. As religion is the property of all, its ministers, through this fact alone, should be in the pay of the nation;" they are essentially "officers of morality and instruction," and "salaried" like judges and professors. Let us fetch them back to this condition of things, which is the only one compatible with the rights of man, and ordain that "the clergy, as well as all corporations and bodies with power of inheritance, are now, and shall be for ever incapable of holding any personal or landed estate."[2255] Who, now, is the legitimate heir of all these vacated possessions? Through another sophism, the State, at once judge and party in the cause, assigns them to the State: "The founders presented them to the Church, that is to say, to the nation."[2256] "Since the nation has permitted their possession by the clergy, she may re-demand that which is possessed only through her authorization." "The principle must be maintained that every nation is solely and veritably proprietor of the possessions of its clergy." This principle, it must be noted, as it is laid down, involves the destruction of ecclesiastical and lay corporations, along with the confiscation of all their possessions, and soon we shall see appearing on the horizon the final and complete decree[2257] by which the Legislative Assembly,