In their all-embracing conception of divine and human things, the State, like a chapter in a book, has its place and their teachings in this chapter are for it of capital importance.

For, here do they write out its rights and duties, the rights and duties of its subjects, a more or less perfect plan of civil order.

This plan, avowed or dissimulated, towards which they incline the preferences of the faithful, issues at length, spontaneously and invincible from their doctrine, like a plant from its seed, to vegetate in temporal society, flower and fructify therein and send its roots deeper down for the purpose of shattering or of consolidating civil and political institutions.

The influence of a Church on the family and on education, on the use of wealth or of authority, on the spirit of obedience or of revolt, on habits of initiation or of inertia, of enjoyment or of abstention, of charity or of egoism, on the entire current train of daily practice and of dominant impulses, in every branch of private or public life, is immense, and constitutes a distinct and permanent social force of the highest order.
Every political calculation is unsound if it is omitted or treated as something of no consequence, and the head of a State is bound to comprehend the nature of it if he would estimate its grandeur.
II.

Napoleon's opinions and methods.
Napoleon's opinions on religion and religious belief .-- His motives in preferring established and positive religions.
-- Difficulty in defining the limit between spiritual and temporal authority .-- Except in Catholic countries, both united in one hand .-- Impossible to effect this union in France arbitrarily .-- Napoleon's way of attaining this end by another process .-- His intention of overcoming spiritual authority through temporal interests.
This is what Napoleon does.