In carrying out this plan, he will use the French clergy in mastering the Pope, as the Pope has been made use of in mastering the French clergy. To this end, before completing the Concordat and decreeing the Organic Articles, he orders for himself a small library, consisting of books on ecclesiastical law. The Latin works of Bossuet are translated for him, and he has drawn up an exposition of the Gallican parliamentary doctrine. The first thing is to go down to the roots of the subject, which he does with extraordinary facility, and then, recasting and shaping all theories to suit himself, he arrives at an original, individual conception, at once coherent, precise, and practical; one which covers the CÆsar and which he applies alike to all churches, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and even Jewish, to every religious community now existing and in time to come. His master-idea is that of the Roman legists and of ancient imperial jurisprudence; here, as elsewhere, the modern CÆsar goes back beyond his Christian predecessors to Constantine, and farther still, to Trajan and Augustus.5144 So long as belief remains silent and solitary, confined within the limits of individual conscience, it is free, and the State has nothing to do with it. But let it transgress these limits, address the public, bring people together in crowds for a common purpose, manifest itself openly, it is subject to control; forms of worship, ceremonies, preaching, instruction and propaganda, the donations it calls forth, the assemblies it convenes, the organization and maintenance of the bodies it engenders, all the positive applications of the inward reverie, are temporal works. In this sense, they form a province of the public domain, and come within the competency of the government, of the administration and of the courts. The State has a right to interdict, to tolerate, or to authorize them, and always to give them proper direction. Sole and universal proprietor of the outward realm in which single consciences may communicate with each other, it intervenes, step by step, either to trace or to bar the way; the road they follow passes over its ground and belongs to it; its watch, accordingly, over their proceedings is, and should be, daily; and it maintains this watch for its own advantage, for the advantage of civil and political interests, in such a way that concern for the other world may be serviceable and not prejudicial to matters which belong to this one. In short, and as a summary, the First Consul says, in a private conversation:

"The people want a religion, and this religion should be in the hands of the government!"5145

On this theme, his jurists, old parliamentarians or conventionalists, his ministers and counselors, Gallicans or Jacobins, his spokesmen in the legislative assembly or the tribunate, all imbued with Roman law or with the Contrat Social are capital megaphones for proclaiming the omnipotence of the State in polished sentences. "The unity of public power and its universality," says Portalis,5146 "are a necessary consequence of its independence." "Public power must be self-sufficient; it is nothing if not all..." Public power cannot tolerate rivals; it cannot allow other powers to establish themselves alongside of it without its consent, perhaps to sap and weaken it. "The authority of a State might become precarious if men on its territory exercise great influence over minds and consciences, unless these men belong to it, at least in some relation." It is careless "if it remains unfamiliar or indifferent to the form and the constitution of the government which proposes to govern souls," if it admits that the limits within which the faith and obedience of believers "can be made or altered without its support, if it has not, in its legally recognized and avowed superiors, guarantees of the fidelity of inferiors." Such was the rule in France for the Catholic cult previous to 1789, and such is to be the rule, after 1801, for all authorized cults. If the State authorizes them, it is "to direct such important institutions with a view to the greatest public utility." Solely because it is favorable to "their doctrine and their discipline" it means to maintain these intact and prevent "their ministers from corrupting the doctrine entrusted to their teaching, or from arbitrarily throwing off the yoke of discipline, to the great prejudice of individuals and the State."5147 Hence, in the legal statute by which a Church is incorporated and realizes what she is, it states in precise terms what it exacts or permits her to be; henceforward she shall be this or that and so remain; her dogmas and her canons, her hierarchy and her internal regime, her territorial subdivisions and circumscriptions, her regular or casual sources of income, her teachings and her liturgy are definite things and fixed limitations. No ecclesiastical assembly, Protestant, Catholic, or Israelite, shall formulate or publish any doctrinal or disciplinary decision without the government's approbation.5148 No ecclesiastical assembly, Protestant, Catholic, or Israelite, shall be held without the approval of the government. All sacerdotal authorities, bishops and curÉs, pastors and ministers of both Protestant confessions, consistorial inspectors and presidents of the Augsbourg Confession, notables of each Israelite circumscription, members of each Israelite consistory, members of the central Israelite consistory, rabbis and grand-rabbis, shall be appointed or accepted by the government and paid by it through an executory" decision of its prefects. All the professors of Protestant or Catholic seminaries shall be appointed and paid by the government. Whatever the seminary, whether Protestant or Catholic, its establishment, its regulations, its internal management, the object and spirit of its studies, shall be submitted to the approval of the government. In each cult, a distinct, formulated, official doctrine shall govern the teaching, preaching, and public or special instruction of every kind; this, for the Israelite cult, is" the doctrine expressed by the decisions of the grand Sanhedrin";5149 for the two Protestant cults, the doctrine of the Confession of Augsbourg, taught in the two seminaries of the East, and the doctrine of the Reformed Church taught in the Genevan seminary;5150 for the Catholic cult, the maxims of the Gallican Church, the declaration, in 1682, of the assembly of the clergy5151 and the four famous propositions depriving the Pope of any authority over sovereigns in temporal matters, subordinating the Pope to ecumenical councils in ecclesiastical and spiritual concerns, and which, in the government of the French Church, limit the authority of the Pope to ancient usages or canons inherited by that Church and accepted by the State.

In this way, the ascendancy of the State, in ecclesiastical matters, increases beyond all measure and remains without any counterpoise. Instead of one Church, it maintains four, while the principal one, the Catholic, comprising 33 million followers, and more dependent than under the old monarchy, loses the privileges which once limited or compensated it for its subjection.—Formerly the prince was its temporal head, on condition that he should be its exterior arm, that it should have the monopoly of education and the censorship of books, that he should use his strong arm against heretics, schismatics and free-thinkers. Of all these obligations which kings accepted, the new sovereign frees himself, and yet, with the Holy See, he holds on to the same prerogatives and, with the Church, the same rights as his predecessors. He is just as minutely dictatorial as formerly with regard to the details of worship. 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 essential5153 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 curÉs 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 abbÉ, 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. Nowadays, every incumbent, from the cardinal-archbishop down to a canon, cantonal curÉ, and director or teacher in a seminary, is appointed or accepted by the civil power to which he swears fidelity. His salary, set down in the budget, is simply that of a public employee, so many francs and centimes for which he comes monthly to the office of the treasury paymaster, along with others of his colleagues who are employed by the State in non-Catholic cults, together with others, his quasi-colleagues, whom the State employs in the university, in the magistrature, in the gendarmerie, and in the police.5155 Such, in all branches of social life, is the universal and final effect of the Revolution. In the Church, as elsewhere, it has extended the interference and preponderance of the State, not inadvertently but intentionally, not accidentally but on principle.5156 "The Constituent" (Assembly), says SimÉon, "had rightly recognized that, religion being one of the oldest and most powerful means of government, it was necessary to bring it more than it had been under the control of the government." Hence, the civil constitution of the clergy; "its only mistake was not to reconcile itself with the Pope." At present, thanks to the agreement between Pope and government (Napoleon, First Consul), the new rÉgime completes the work of the ancient rÉgime and, in the Church as elsewhere, the domination of the centralizing State is complete.