An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📖

and he can influence it only by the fears and expectations

which he may excite in the greater part of the individuals of the

order. Those fears and expectations 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 govermnent, 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 managimg

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 had 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 which all

the movements and operations could now be directed by one head,

and conducted upon one uniform plan. The clergy of each

particular country might be considered as a particular detachment

of that army, of which the operations could easily be supported

and seconded by all the other detachments quartered in the

different countries round about. Each detachment was not only

independent of the sovereign of the country in which it was

quartered, and by which it was maintained, but dependent upon a

foreign sovereign, who could at any time turn its arms against

the sovereign of that particular country, and support them by the

arms of all the other detachments.

 

Those arms were the most formidable that can well be imagined. In

the ancient state of Europe, before the establishment of arts and

manufactures, the wealth of the clergy gave them the same sort of

influence over the common people which that of the great barons

gave them over their respective vassals, tenants, and retainers.

In the great landed estates, which the mistaken piety both of

princes and private persons had bestowed upon the church,

jurisdictions were established, of the same kind with those of

the great barons, and for the same reason. In those great landed

estates, the clergy, or their bailiffs, could easily keep the

peace, without the support or assistance either of the king or of

any other person; and neither the king nor any other person could

keep the peace there without the support and assistance of the

clergy. The jurisdictions of the clergy, therefore, in their

particular baronies or manors, were equally independent, and

equally exclusive of the authority of the king’s courts, as those

of the great temporal lords. The tenants of the clergy were, like

those of the great barons, almost all tenants at will, entirely

dependent upon their immediate lords, and, therefore, liable to

be called out at pleasure, in order to fight in any quarrel in

which the clergy might think proper to engage them. Over and

above the rents of those estates, the clergy possessed in the

tithes a very large portion of the rents of all the other estates

in every kingdom of Europe. The revenues arising from both those

species of rents were, the greater part of them, paid in kind, in

corn, wine, cattle, poultry, etc. The quantity exceeded greatly

what the clergy could themselves consume; and there were neither

arts nor manufactures, for the produce of which they could

exchange the surplus. The clergy could derive advantage from this

immense surplus in no other way than by employing it, as the

great barons employed the like surplus of their revenues, in the

most profuse hospitality, and in the most extensive charity. Both

the hospitality and the charity of the ancient clergy,

accordingly, are said to have been very great. They not only

maintained almost the whole poor of every kingdom, but many

knights and gentlemen had frequently no other means of

subsistence than by travelling about from monastery to monastery,

under pretence of devotion, but in reality to enjoy the

hospitality of the clergy. The retainers of some particular

prelates were often as numerous as those of the greatest

lay-lords ; and the retainers of all the clergy taken together

were, perhaps, more numerous than those of all the lay-lords.

There was always much more union among the clergy than among the

lay-lords. The former were under a regular discipline and

subordination to the papal authority. The latter were under no

regular discipline or subordination, but almost always equally

jealous of one another, and of the king. Though the tenants and

retainers of the clergy, therefore, had both together been less

numerous than those of the great lay-lords, and their tenants

were probably much less numerous, yet their union would have

rendered them more formidable. The hospitality and charity of the

clergy, too, not only gave them the command of a great temporal

force, but increased very much the weight of their spiritual

weapons. Those virtues procured them the highest respect and

veneration among all the inferior ranks of people, of whom many

were constantly, and almost all occasionally, fed by them.

Everything belonging or related to so popular an order, its

possessions, its privileges, its doctrines, necessarily appeared

sacred in the eyes of the common people; and every violation of

them, whether real or pretended, the highest act of sacrilegious

wickedness and profaneness. In this state of things, if the

sovereign frequently found it difficult to resist the confederacy

of a few of the great nobility, we cannot wonder that he should

find it still more so to resist the united force of the clergy of

his own dominions, supported by that of the clergy of all the

neighbouring dominions. In such circumstances, the wonder is, not

that he was sometimes obliged to yield, but that he ever was able

to resist.

 

The privileges of the clergy in those ancient times (which to

us, who live in the present times, appear the most absurd), their

total exemption from the secular jurisdiction, for example, or

what in England was called the benefit ofclergy, were the

natural, or rather the necessary, consequences of this state of

things. How dangerous must it have been for the sovereign to

attempt to punish a clergyman for any crime whatever, if his

order were disposed to protect him, and to represent either the

proof as insufficient for convicting so holy a man, or the

punishment as too severe to be inflicted upon one whose person

had been rendered sacred by religion ? The sovereign could, in

such circumstances, do no better than leave him to be tried by

the ecclesiastical courts, who, for the honour of their own

order, were interested to restrain, as much as possible, every

member of it from committing enormous crimes, or even from giving

occasion to such gross scandal as might disgust the minds of the

people.

 

In the state in which things were, through the greater part of

Europe, during the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth

centuries, and