popular at the dawn of the nineteenth century. They are excellent in times of order, to indicate the absurdity of an existing system of government; but when there is no government to criticise, and anarchy has succeeded the putting into practice of their doctrines, they have less authority as saviours of society. So Napoleon refrained from calling to his counsels the idealogues, as he styled them. With his mind set on the reconstruction of France, he recognised the necessity of conciliating and organising the religious sentiment which existed in the nation and he resolved to find a lasting solution of the problem.

In this gigantic task Napoleon was disturbed by no religious predispositions of his own. He had none of the bitterness of the renegade, and little of the superstitious respect for the faith of his fathers which often is found in the minds of the most irreligious. In the marvellous edifice of government which he was constructing he regarded public worship as an essential apartment, and his reserving a place in it

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for the Protestant confessions and, subsequently, for the Jewish religion showed how detached and impartial was his view of its functions. Of this detachment he was wont to boast. A year after the signature of the Concordat, he denied that he was a Papist," to use his own expression; but to prove that he was nothing (rien) he declared that in Egypt he was a Mussulman-a somewhat exaggerated statement. Again and again his regret is recorded that the sentiment of the nation would not permit him to follow the example of Henry VIII., and found a statutory Church, of which the head should be the chief of the French Government.† The failure of the Constitutional Clergy to win either esteem or popularity showed him that it was useless to try to establish a Church which Rome considered schismatic, and his penetrating observation told him that Protestantism was not in conformity with the temperament

Thibaudeau : 21 prairial an. X.

† Pelet de la Lozère : Consalvi: &c.

and traditions of the French. The detachment of his view was strengthened by the fact that he was a foreigner without a drop of French blood in his veins, who, when he came back from the East to be the absolute ruler of France, had spent in France, man and boy, only fourteen years. That this, combined with his intuitive genius, enabled him to judge more clearly the wants of France is shown by the durability of his constructive work both in Church and State.

Before Marengo the First Consul had relaxed some of the restrictions in force against the Catholic religion, and after the battle he was present at a Te Deum sung in Milan Cathedral in celebration of his victory. These acts showed the direction his purpose was taking, and sixteen days after the battle, before he re-crossed the Alps, a letter which he instructed the aged Cardinal Martiniana, Bishop of Vercelli, to write to the Pope formed the first basis of the negotiations which led to the Concordat of the following year.

If time permitted, it would be interesting to trace the course of those negotiations. The obstructive intrigues of Talleyrand, who had no desire for an arrangement with the Church, of which he had been a prelate, and the arguments of Grégoire, the Constitutional Bishop who was attached to the revolutionary schism, alone form a curious chapter of history. It must suffice to say that the Concordat was signed at Paris on July 15th, 1801. The plenipotentiaries of Pius VII. were Consalvi, his Secretary of State, the most conspicuous Cardinal of his time, though he never took priest's Orders, who afterwards came to England with the allied Sovereigns in 1814, and whose portrait hangs at Windsor; Spina, titular Archbishop of Corinth; and Caselli, the Pope's theologian who was general of the Servites. The signatories on behalf of the First Consul were his brother, Joseph Bonaparte; Crétet, a Councillor of State, a financier who had enriched himself by the acquisition of the confiscated Chartreuse of Dijon; and Bernier, the royalist soldier-priest who had

betrayed his chiefs to the Republicans in the war of the Vendée. Thus, of the eight persons, including the principals, responsible for the text of the Concordat, six were of Italian race and only two were French. It may be noted that the word Concordat, derived from the Low Latin concordatum, is not found in either the Latin or the French version of the instrument. It is there called conventio or convention, Concordat being the traditional name for previous treaties between French rulers and the Holy See, which had been adopted by Voltaire and other classical writers.

The Concordat.

There are few documents of equal importance which are as brief as the Concordat of 1801. It contains only seventeen short clauses. Its chief provisions are that the Roman Catholic religion should be freely and publicly practised in France, subject to rules which the French Government should deem necessary in the interest of public order; that the First Consul should nominate the Bishops and the Pope confer canonical