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e French nation." Josephine probably had very little religious knowledge. She regarded Christianity as a sentiment rather than a principle. She felt the poetic beauty of its revelations and its ordinances. She knew how holy were its charities, how pure its precepts, how ennobling its influences, even when encumbered with the grossest superstitions. She had seen, and dreadfully had she felt, what France was without religion--with marriage a mockery, conscience a phantom, and death proclaimed to all an eternal sleep. She therefore most warmly seconded her husband in all endeavors to restore again to desolated France the religion of Jesus Christ. The next morning after the issuing of the proclamation announcing the re-establishment of public worship, a grand religious ceremony took place in honor of the occasion in the church of Notre Dame. Napoleon, to produce a deep impression upon the public mind, invested the occasion with all possible pomp. As he was preparing to go to the Cathedral, one of his colleagues, Cambaceres, entered the room. "Well," said the first consul, rubbing his hands in fine spirits, "we go to church this morning; what say they to that in Paris?" "Many people," replied Cambaceres, "propose to attend the first representation in order to hiss the piece, should they not find it amusing." "If any one takes it into his head to hiss, I shall put him out of the door by the grenadiers of the consular guard." "But what if the grenadiers themselves take to hissing like the rest?" "As to that, I have no fear. My old mustaches will go here to Notre Dame just as at Cairo they would have gone to the mosque. They will remark how I do, and, seeing their general grave and decent, they will be so too, passing the watchword to each other, _Decency_!" In the noble proclamation which the first consul issued upon this great event, he says, "An insane policy has sought, during the Revolution, to smother religious dissensions under the ruins of the altar, under the ashes of religion itself. At its voice all those pious solemnities ceased in which the citizens called each other by the endearing name of brothers, and acknowledged their common equality in the sight of Heaven. The dying, left alone in his agonies, no longer heard that consoling voice which calls the Christian to a better world. God himself seemed exiled from the face of nature. Ministers of the religion of peace! let a complete oblivion veil over
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