Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy

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The astonishing period of political history upon which our days have fallen, robs all former times of wonder, wearies expectation, sickens even hope! while the occurrences of every passing minute have such prevalence over our minds, that public affairs assume the interest of private feelings, affect domestic peace, and occupy not merely the most retired part of mankind, but even mothers, wives, and children with solicitude irresistible.

Yet the amazement which has been excited, though stupendous, though terrific, by the general events that in our neighbour kingdom have convulsed all order, and annihilated tranquility, is feeble, is almost null, compared with that produced by the living contrast of virtue and of guilt exhibited in the natives of one and the same country; virtue, the purest and most disinterested, emanating from the first best cause, religion; and guilt, too heinous for any idea to which we have hitherto given definition.

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What then remains? Must their dreadful hardships, their meek endurance, their violated rights, terminate in the death of hunger?

No! there is yet a resource; a resource against which neither modesty nor equity plead; a resource which, on the contrary, has every moral propensity, every divine obligation, in its favour: this resource is Female Beneficence.

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