Reformers from feeling, priests by the state, sensible of the wide discrepancy between their opinions and their character, a national religion, a revolutionary Christianity, was the sole means remaining to them to reconcile their interest and their policy: their faith, wholly academic, was only a religious convenience.

They desired to transform Catholicism insensibly into a moral code, of which the dogma was now but a symbol, which, in the people's eyes, comprised sacred truths; and which, gradually stripped of holy fictions, would allow the human understanding to glide insensibly into a symbolic deism, whose temple should be flesh, and whose Christ should be hardly more than Plato rendered a divinity.
Fauchet had the daring mind of a sectarian and the intrepidity of a man of resolution.
VII.
"We are accused of a desire to persecute.

It is calumny.

No persecution.
Fanaticism is greedy of it, real religion repulses it, philosophy holds it in horror.

Let us beware of imprisoning the nonjurors; of exiling, even of displacing them.