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All classes were outraged. The nobles were offended because ecclesiastics, perhaps foreign ecclesiastics, were to be empowered to sit in the provincial estates and to control their proceedings in place of easy, indolent, ignorant abbots and friars, who had generally accepted the influence of the great seignors.
When Luther urged the princes to assail the ecclesiastics, to seize church lands, and to put an end to financial abuses, the peasants naturally listened to his words with open ears and proceeded with glad hearts to apply his advice themselves. The new Lutheran theology may have been too refined for the peasants, but they imagined they understood its purport.
The result of this arrangement was that the parish priests far outnumbered the regular ecclesiastics and dignitaries, and that the clerical cahiers oftenest express the wishes of the lower portion of the secular clergy. This preponderance of the lower clergy appears to have been foreseen and desired by the royal advisers.
The ceremony was not precisely the same as in the case of a lay noble being invested with a fief; but in France, at any rate, the Crown never really abandoned its claim to a feudal homage, and in any case ecclesiastics were expected to fulfil their feudal obligations.
The Doctor began; and in order to give his thoughts more connectedly, we will omit the conversational breaks, the questions and comments of the clergyman, and all accidental interruptions. "When the old ecclesiastics said that where there were three doctors there were two atheists, they lied, of course.
Scientific truths which have been considered absolute, theories which have produced approximately correct results, have all been discredited. The dogmas of science against which the dogmatic ecclesiastics have directed their scornful contempt have shared the same fate as the ecclesiastical dogmas. Nothing remains certain save the certainty of change. There are no ultimates.
Although the conversation to which he subjected her had resulted in her favour, he had deemed it beneficial to place a priest who was devoted to him among the ecclesiastics in the little castle. To surround her with spies chosen from the lay class was repugnant to his lofty nature.
Like many other men at the time, and still more of to-day, he was at a loss to discover how ecclesiastics of such a stamp could remain in the ministry of the Church of England, when they seemed to ordinary eyes to be in league with Rome. The prelates, almost to a man, were hotly opposed to the Tractarians when Lord John wrote the Durham Letter. They shared his convictions and applauded his action.
The peasants burned some of the houses of the gentry and of the rich ecclesiastics, and took particular pains to see that the lists for the collection of the hated poll tax were destroyed, as well as the registers kept by the various lords enumerating the obligations of their serfs.
Locke's Essay had been translated in 1700, but it had made no mark, and as late as 1725 the first edition of the translation remained unsold. It was the weakness and unsightly decrepitude of the ecclesiastics which opened the way for the thinkers. This victory, however, was not yet. Diderot had still a dismal wilderness to traverse.
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