The king of France, Henry IV. had given the example of another security against the pontifical enterprises, when, by his edict of Nantes, he permitted the free exercise of a religion which was not that of the state, and of which he had the happiness to acknowledge and abjure the errors. Toleration of all modes of adoring the Deity is a debt due from sovereigns to their subjects; the gospel which directs the preaching of truths and the enlightening those who are in error, forbids by this very act itself the persecuting of them; for persecution must rather confirm in heresy or extort hypocritical abjurations, which deprave morality and outrage religion. All the Christian kings who have harassed religious sects, have been in their turn disturbed by the popes, and obliged to resist them: St. Louis himself did not escape this just ordination of Providence. To know how far a prince yields to the yoke of the pontiffs; we have only to look to what degree he limits the consciences of his subjects; his own independence is to be measured by the religious liberty which he permits to them: it is necessary, if he wish not to be subjected himself, that he inflexibly refuse to priests, or to the prince of priests, the proscription of modes of worship which differ from the dominant church. The liberty, or if you please, the toleration of these various professions, supposes in those who exercise them the perfect enjoyment of every right, civil and political, granted to other subjects; whence it follows, that legislation should altogether detach from the religious system the particular situation of individuals, and consequently the circumstances of births, marriages, divorces, burials, which tend to determine it. Here the ecclesiastical office is confined to exhorting the faithful to the observance of certain precepts, or to religious advice, and administering to them the rites of the church or the sacraments, instituted to sanctify the various periods of human life. It is to civil legislation, and to it alone, can belong the establishment of offices purely civil to verify these acts, to invest them with the forms it has prescribed, and which ought to ensure the public authenticity of them, and guarantee all their effects. Now such a legislation is in itself one of the firmest barriers against ecclesiastical usurpation, and the fatal influence which the head of the clergy would willingly exercise in the bosom of empires and of families.