As such, we have already banished from France all unsworn ecclesiastics, about forty thousand priests, and we are deporting those who did not cross the frontier within the allotted time: we allow only sexagenarians and the infirm to remain on French soil, and, again, as prisoners and in seclusion; they incur the penalty of death if they do not of their own accord report to the prisons of their country town; the banished who return home incur the penalty of death, and there is penalty of death against those who shelter priests.[2130] Consequently, in default of an orthodox clergy, there must no longer be an orthodox worship; the most dangerous of the two manufactories of superstition is shut down.

That the sale of this poisonous food may be more surely stopped we punish those who ask for it the same as those who provide it, and we prosecute not only the pastors, but, again, the fanatics of the flock; if these are not the authors of the ecclesiastical rebellion they are its promoters and accomplices.
Now, thanks to the schism among them, we already know who they are, and, in each commune, the list is made out.

We style as fanatics all who reject the ministry of the sworn priests, the bourgeois who calls him an interloper, all the nuns who do not confess to him, all the peasants who stay away from his mass, all the old women who do not kiss his paten, and all the relations of an infant who do not wish him to baptize it.
All these people and those who associate with them, whether allied, close relatives, friends, guests or visitors, of whatever class, either men or women, are seditious at heart, and, therefore, "suspects." We deprive them of their electoral rights, we withdraw their pensions, we impose on them special taxation, we confine them to their dwellings, we imprison them by thousands, and guillotine them by hundreds; the rest will gradually become discouraged and abandon an impracticable cult.[2131]--The lukewarm remain, the sheep-like crowd which holds on to its rites: the Constituent Assembly will seize them wherever it finds them, and, as they are the same in the authorized as in the refractory church, instead of seeking them with the priest who does not submit, it will seek them with the one who does.

But it will proceed without zeal, without confidence, often even with distrust, questioning itself whether these rites, being administered by one who is excommunicated, are not of doubtful quality.

Such a church is not sound, and we have only to give it a push to knock it down.