ent, verified
loyalty of believers. It cannot be done away with by supposing it
non-existent; on the contrary, a competent statesman will maintain it in
order to make use of it and apply it to civil purposes. Like an engineer
who comes across a prolific spring near his factory, he will not try to
dry it up, nor let the water be dispersed and lost; he has no idea
of letting it remain inactive; on the contrary, he collects it, digs
channels for it, directs and economizes the flow, and renders the water
serviceable in his workshops. In the Catholic Church, the authority to
be won and utilized is that of the clergy over believers and that of the
sovereign pontiff over the clergy.

"You will see," exclaimed Bonaparte, while negotiating the Concordat,
"how I will turn the priests to account, and, first of all, the
Pope!"[5125]

III. Dealing with the Pope.

Services which he obliges the Pope to render.--Resignation
or dismissal of the old bishops.--End of the constitutional
Church.--Right of appointing bishops and of sanctioning
cures given to the First Consul.

"Had no Pope existed," he says again,[5126] "it would have been
necessary to create him for the occasion, in the same way that the Roman
consuls appointed a dictator for difficult circumstances." Only such a
dictator could effect the coup d'etat which the First Consul needed,
in order to constitute the head of the new government a patron of
the Catholic Church, to bring independent or refractory priests under
subjection, to sever the canonical cord which bound the French clergy to
its exiled superiors and to the old order of things, "to break the
last thread by which the Bourbons still communicated with the country."
"Fifty emigre[5127] bishops in the pay of England now lead the French
clergy. Their influence must be got rid of, and to do this the authority
of the Pope is essential; he can dismiss or make them resign." Should
any of them prove obstinate and unwilling to descend from their thrones,
their refusal brings them into discredit, and they are "designated[5128]
as rebels who prefer the things of this world, their terrestrial
interests to the interests of heaven and the cause of God." The great
body of the clergy along with their flocks will abandon them; they will
soon be forgotten, like old sprouts transplanted whose roots have been
cut off; they will die abroad, one by one, while the successor, who is
now in office, will find no