may consist in the fear of deprivation
or other punishment, and in the expectation
of further preferment.
In all Christian churches, the benefices of
the clergy are a sort of freeholds, which they
enjoy, not during pleasure, but during life or
good behaviour. If they held them by a
more precarious tenure, and were liable to be
turned out upon every slight disobligation
either of the sovereign or of his ministers, it
would perhaps be impossible for them to
maintain their authority with the people, who
would then consider them as mercenary
dependents upon the court, in the sincerity of
whose instructions they could no longer have
any confidence. But should the sovereign
attempt irregularly, and by violence, to deprive
any number of clergymen of their freeholds,
on account, perhaps, of their having
propagated, with more than ordinary zeal,
some factious or seditious doctrine, he would
only render, by such persecution, both them
and their doctrine ten times more popular,
and therefore ten times more troublesome and
dangerous, than they had been before. Fear
is in almost all cases a wretched instrument
of government, and ought in particular never
to be employed against any order of men who
have the smallest pretensions to independency.
To attempt to terrify them, serves only to
irritate their bad humour, and to confirm
them in an opposition, which more gentle
usage, perhaps, might easily induce them
either to soften, or to lay aside altogether.
The violence which the French government
usually employed in order to oblige all their
parliaments, or sovereign courts of justice,
to enregister any unpopular edict, very seldom
succeeded. The means commonly employed,
however, the imprisonment of all the
refractory members, one would think, were
forcible enough. The princes of the house
of Stuart sometimes employed the like means
in order to influence some of the members of
the parliament of England, and they generally
found them equally intractable. The parliament
of England is now managed in another
manner; and a very small experiment,
which the duke of Choiseul made, about
twelve years ago, upon the parliament of
Paris, demonstrated sufficiently that all the
parliaments of France might have been managed
still more easily in the same manner.
That experiment was not pursued. For
though management and persuasion are always
the easiest and safest instruments of
government as force and violence are the
worst and the most dangerous; yet such, it
seems, is the natural insolence of man, that
he almost always disdains to use the good instrument,
except when he cannot or dare not
use the bad one. The French government
could and durst use force, and therefore disdained
to use management and persuasion.
But there is no order of men, it appears I
believe, from the experience of all ages, upon
whom it is so dangerous or rather so perfectly
ruinous, to employ force and violence, as upon
the respected clergy of an established
church. The rights, the privileges, the personal
liberty of every individual ecclesiastic,
who is upon good terms with his own order,
are, even in the most despotic governments,
more respected than those of any other person
of nearly equal rank and fortune. It is so in
every gradation of despotism, from that of the
gentle and mild government of Paris, to that
of the violent and furious government of Constantinople.
But though this order of men
can scarce ever be forced, they may be managed
as easily as any other; and the security
of the sovereign, as well as the public tranquillity,
seems to depend very much upon the
means which he has of managing them; and
those means seem to consist altogether in the
preferment which he has to bestow upon them.
In the ancient constitution of the Christian
church, the bishop of each diocese was elected
by the joint votes of the clergy and of the
people of the episcopal city. The people did
not long retain their right of election; and
while they did retain it, they almost always
acted under the influence of the clergy, who,
in such spiritual matters, appeared to be their
natural guides. The clergy, however, soon
grew weary of the trouble of managing them,
and found it easier to elect their own bishops
themselves. The abbot, in the same manner,
was elected by the monks of the monastery,
at least in the greater part of abbacies. All
the inferior ecclesiastical benefices comprehended
within the diocese were collated by
the bishop, who bestowed them upon such
ecclesiastics as he thought proper. All church
preferments were in this manner in the disposal
of the church. The sovereign, though
he might have some indirect influence in those
elections, and though it was sometimes usual
to ask both his consent to elect, and his approbation
of the election, yet had no direct or
sufficient means of managing the clergy. The
ambition of every clergyman naturally led him
to pay court, not so much to his sovereign as
to his own order, from which only he could
expect preferment.
Through the greater part of Europe, the
pope gradually drew to himself, first the collation
of almost all bishoprics and abbacies,
or of what were called consistorial benefices,
and afterwards, by various machinations
and pretences, of the greater part of inferior
benefices comprehended within each diocese,
little more being left to the bishop than what
was barely necessary to give him a decent
authority with his own clergy. By this arrangement
the condition of the sovereign was
still worse than it bad been before. The clergy
of all the different countries of Europe were
thus formed into a sort of spiritual army, dispersed
in different quarters, indeed, but of