[Footnote 5284: "Le clergé française en 1890" (by an anonymous ecclesiastic), p. 72. (On the smaller parishes.) "The task of the curé here is thankless if he is zealous, too easy if he has no zeal. In any event, he is an isolated man, with no resources whatever, tempted by all the demons of solitude and inactivity."--Ibid.,,92. "Our authority among the common classes as well as among thinking people is held in check; the human mind is to-day fully emancipated and society secularized."-- Ibid., 15. "Indifference seems to have retired from the summits of the nation only to descend to the lower strata.... In France, the priest is the more liked the less he is seen; to efface himself, to disappear is what is first and most often demanded of him. The clergy and the nation live together side by side, scarcely in contact, through certain actions in life, and never intermingling."] CHAPTER III THE CLERGY I. The regular clergy. The regular clergy.--Difference in the condition of the two clergies.--The three vows.--Rules.--Life in common.--Object of the system.--Violent suppression of the institution and its abuses in 1790.--Spontaneous revival of the institution free of its abuses after 1800.--Democratic and republican character of monastic constitutions.--Vegetation of the old stock and multiplication of new plants,--Number of monks and nuns.--Proportion of these numbers to the total population in 1789 and 1878.--Predominance of the organizations for labor and charity.--How formed and extended.--Social instinct and contact with the mystic world.