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 ground 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 Caesar goes back beyond his Christian predecessors to Constantine, and farther still, to Trajan and Augustus.[44] 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!"[45]