The clergy, in its cassock, is an additional spiritual gendarmerie, much more efficient than the temporal gendarmerie in its stout boots, while the essential thing is to make both keep step together in concert.
Between the two domains, between that which belongs to civil authority and that which belongs to religious authority, is there any line of separation?
"I look in vain[5119] where to place it; its existence is purely chimerical.

I see only clouds, obscurities, difficulties.

The civil government condemns a criminal to death; the priest gives him absolution and offers him paradise." In relation to this act, both powers operate publicly in an inverse sense on the same individual, one with the guillotine and the other with a pardon.

As these authorities may clash with each other, let us prevent conflicts and leave no undefined frontier; let us trace this out beforehand; let us indicate what our part is and not allow the Church to encroach on the State .-- The Church rally wants all; it is the accessory which she concedes to us, while she appropriates the principal to herself.
"Mark the insolence of the priests[5120] who, in sharing authority with what they call the temporal power, reserve to themselves all action on the mind, the noblest part of man, and take it on themselves to reduce my part merely to physical action.

They retain the soul and fling me the corpse!" In antiquity, things were much better done, and are still better done now in Moslem countries.
"In the Roman republic,[5121] the senate was the interpreter of heaven, and this was the incentive of the force and strength of that government.
In Turkey, and throughout the Orient, the Koran serves as both a civil and religious bible.