Sometimes he fixes the fees and perquisites of the priests for administering the sacraments: "This charge is a purely civil and temporal operation, since it resolves itself into a levy of so many pence on the citizen.

Bishops and priests should not be allowed to decide here.[5152] The government alone must remain the arbiter between the priest who receives and the person who pays." Sometimes, he intervenes in the publication of plenary indulgence: "It is essential[5153] that indulgences should not be awarded for causes which might be contrary to public order or to the welfare of the country; the political magistrate is equally interested in knowing what the authority is that grants indulgences; if its title to act is legal, to what persons indulgences are granted, what persons are entrusted with their distribution, and what persons are to fix the term and duration of extraordinary prayers."-- Thus bound and held by the State, the Church is simply one of its appendices, for its own free roots by which, in this close embrace, it still vegetates and keeps erect have all been cut off short; torn from the soil and grafted on the State, they derive their sap and their roots from the civil powers.

Before 1789, the clergy formed a distinct order in temporal society and, above all others, a body possessing property and exempt from taxes, a tax-payer apart which, represented in periodical assemblies, negotiated every five years with the King himself, granted him subsidies and, in exchange for this "disinterested gift," secured for itself concessions or confirmations of immunities, prerogatives and favors.

Today, it is merely a collection of ordinary individuals and subjects, even less than that--an administrative staff similar to that of the university, of the magistrature, of the treasury, and of the woods and forests, even more closely watched and bridled, with more detailed precautions and stricter interdictions.

Before 1789, the cures and other second-class officials were, for the most part, selected and installed without the prince's intervention, sometimes by the bishop of the diocese or a neighboring abbe, sometimes by independent collators, by the titular himself,[5154] by a lay patron or a chapter, by a commune, by an indultaire, by the pope, while the salary of each titular, large or small, was his private property, the annual product of a piece of land or of some indebtedness attached to his office and which he administered.