He attends their mass immediately on their return and will put up with no other.
Brutalized as he may be, or indifferent and dull, and his mind filled with nothing but animal concerns, he needs them;[3182] he misses their solemnities, the great festivals, the Sunday; and this privation is a periodical want both for eyes and ears; he misses the ceremonial, the lights, the chants, the ringing of the bells, the morning and evening Angelus .-- Thus, whether he knows it or not, his heart and senses are Catholic[3183] and he demands the old church back again.

Before the Revolution, this church lived on its own revenues; 70,000 priests, 37,000 nuns, 23,000 monks, supported by endowments, cost the State nothing, and scarcely anything to the tax-payer; at any rate, they cost nothing to the actual, existing tax-payer not even the tithes, for, established many centuries ago, the tithes were a tax on the soil, not on the owner in possession, nor on the farmer who tilled the ground, who has purchased or hired it with this tax deducted.

In any case, the real property of the Church belonged to it, without prejudice to anybody, through the strongest legal and most legitimate of property titles, the last will and testament of thousands of the dead, its founders and benefactors.

All is taken from it, even the houses of prayer which, in their use, disposition and architecture, were, in the most manifest manner, Christian works and ecclesiastical objects, 38,000 parsonages, 4000 convents, over 40,000 parochial churches, cathedrals and chapels.
Every morning, the man or woman of the people, in whom the need of worship has revived, passes in front of one of these buildings robbed of its cult; these declare aloud to them through their form and name what they have been and what they should be to-day.

This voice is heard by incredulous philosophers and former Conventionalists;[3184] all Catholics hear it, and out of thirty-five millions of Frenchmen,[3185] thirty-two millions are Catholics.
VII.