leon conveyed his most sacred thoughts, domestic,
civil, and religious. He made him one of his executors, bequeathed to
him a fortune, entrusted him with the custody of precious documents,
and to his dying day the recipient of such flattering confidences
never betrayed by word or act the faith that was reposed in him, nor
did he ever falter in his devotion to the martyr's cause. It is from
him we have handed down the famous constitution drawn up by Napoleon
for his son, which is pregnant with democratic wisdom and flows with
the genius of statesmanship. We get, too, a vivid knowledge of the
religious side of Napoleon's versatile character. His talks and
dictations on this controversial subject are unorthodox if you like,
but nevertheless religious; copious in thought and trenchant in
vocabulary, they disclose the magic of a well-stored inspired mind. He
indulges in neither puerilities nor conventionalities. He is a
vigorous student of the Bible and the Koran; he knows his subject, and
speaks his reasonings without reservation, and in the end we see the
vision of the omnipotent God fixed in an enduring belief.

In the first clause of his will he declares: "I die in the Apostolic
Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years
since." If any other proof were needed that he believed in the
divinity of Jesus Christ, this avowed declaration on the eve of the
great transformation may be confirmed by the fact that the cardinal
doctrine of the Roman religion centres in the divinity of Christ.
Again, in the course of his public and private duties, you frequently
come across passages in his letters and official documents such as
"May God have you in His holy keeping." It may be said that this is a
mere form or figure of speech but then unbelievers do not use such
phrases.

We find in everyday life a lack of courage to do justice and be
generous to one another. But surely, in the interest of political,
historical, and personal rectitude, the dying man's message to the
world should absolve him from having his lucid, succinct
conversations jargoned into a tattered tedium. It is either a
perversion of understanding or a misanthropic egoism that can twist
Napoleon's discourses on religious topics into meaning that he ever
was seriously thinking of giving preference to the worship of the sun,
or contemplating becoming a follower of Mohammed, or that he ever
showed real evidences of being an unbeliever in the Go