n
and to a cloistral life. The chances are that, with them, the
feverishness of youth will end in the heat of conviction and in the
prejudices of inexperience; in this event, the government which exempts
them from the conscription to admit them in the Church exchanges a good
military recruit for a bad ecclesiastical recruit; in place of a servant
it creates an opponent. Hence, during the fifteen years of his reign,
Napoleon authorizes only six thousand new ordinations,[5186] in all
four hundred per annum, one hundred for each diocese or six or seven per
annum. Meanwhile, by his university decrees, he lets lay daylight into
clerical enclosures[5187] and shuts the door of all ecclesiastical
dignities to suspicious priests.[5188] For more security, in every
diocese in which "the principles of the bishop" do not give him full
satisfaction, he prohibits all ordination, nomination, promotion, or
favor whatever. "I have stricken off[5189] all demands relating to the
bishoprics of Saint-Brieuc, Bordeaux, Ghent, Tournay, Troyes and the
Maritime Alps.... My intention is that you do not, for these dioceses,
propose to me any exemption of service for conscripts, no nominations
for scholarships, for curacies, or for canonries. You will send in a
report on the dioceses which it would be well to strike with this ban."
Towards the end, the Gallicism of Bossuet no longer suffices for him; he
allowed it to be taught at Saint-Sulpice, and M. Emery, director of this
institution, was the priest in France whom he esteemed the most and
most willingly consulted; but a pupil's imprudent letter had been just
intercepted, and, accordingly, the spirit of that association is a
bad one. An order of expulsion of the director is issued and the
installation in his place of a new one "day after to-morrow," as well as
new administrators of whom none shall be Sulpician.[5190] "Take measures
to have this congregation dissolved. I will have no Sulpicians in the
seminary of Paris.[5191] Let me know the seminaries that are served
by Sulpicians in order that they too may be sent away from these
seminaries."[5192]--And let the seminarists who have been badly taught
by their masters take heed not to practice in their own behalf the
false doctrines which the State proscribes; especially, let them
never undertake, as they do in Belgium, to disobey the civil power in
deference to the Pope and their bishop. At Tournay,[5193] all those over
eighteen years of age are s