and bridled, with more detailed precautions and stricter
interdictions. Before 1789, the cures and other second-class officials
were, for the most part, selected and installed without the prince's
intervention, sometimes by the bishop of the diocese or a neighboring
abbe, sometimes by independent collators, by the titular himself,[5154]
by a lay patron or a chapter, by a commune, by an indultaire, by the
pope, while the salary of each titular, large or small, was his private
property, the annual product of a piece of land or of some indebtedness
attached to his office and which he administered. Nowadays, every
incumbent, from the cardinal-archbishop down to a canon, cantonal cure,
and director or teacher in a seminary, is appointed or accepted by the
civil power to which he swears fidelity. His salary, set down in the
budget, is simply that of a public employee, so many francs and centimes
for which he comes monthly to the office of the treasury paymaster,
along with others of his colleagues who are employed by the State in
non-Catholic cults, together with others, his quasi-colleagues,
whom the State employs in the university, in the magistrature, in the
gendarmerie, and in the police.[5155] Such, in all branches of social
life, is the universal and final effect of the Revolution. In the
Church, as elsewhere, it has extended the interference and preponderance
of the State, not inadvertently but intentionally, not accidentally
but on principle.[5156] "The Constituent" (Assembly), says Simeon,
"had rightly recognized that, religion being one of the oldest and most
powerful means of government, it was necessary to bring it more than
it had been under the control of the government." Hence, the civil
constitution of the clergy; "its only mistake was not to reconcile
itself with the Pope." At present, thanks to the agreement between Pope
and government (Napoleon, First Consul), the new regime completes
the work of the ancient regime and, in the Church as elsewhere, the
domination of the centralizing State is complete.

VI. Napoleon Executes the Concordat.

Reasons for suppressing the regular clergy.--Authorized
religious associations.--The authorization revocable.

These are the grand lines of the new ecclesiastical establishment, and
the general connections by which the Catholic Church, like an apartment
in a building, finds itself included in and incorporated with the State.
It need not disconnect itself