himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept
the legal establishment of which he is a part, not damn his Protestant
neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful member of
temporal society and a loyal subject of the civil power; let him be a
Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an
ultramontanist or a bigot. - Precautions are taken to this effect. No
seminarist may become subdeacon without the consent of the government,
and the list of ordinations each year, sent to him at Paris by the
bishop, is returned, cut down to the strictly necessary.[84] From the
very beginning, and in express terms,[85] Napoleon has reserved all
curacies and vicarages for "ecclesiastics pensioned by virtue of the
laws of the Constituent Assembly." Not only, through this confusion
between pension and salary, does he lighten a pecuniary burden, but he
greatly prefers old priests to young ones; many of them have been
constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism; it is he who
has brought them back from exile or saved them from oppression, and
they are grateful for it; having suffered long and patiently, they are
weary, they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable.
Moreover, he has precise information about each one; their past
conduct is a guarantee of their future conduct; he never chooses one
of them with his eyes shut. On the contrary, the candidates for
ordination are strangers, the government which accepts them knows
nothing about them except that, at the age when the fever of growth or
of the imagination takes a fixed form, they have been subject for five
years to a theological education 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