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]

On this theme, his jurists, old parliamentarians or conventionalists,