Far more distinctively the work of Napoleon's own mind was the reconciliation with the Church of Rome effected by the Concordat. It was a restoration of religion similar to that restoration of political order which made the public service the engine of a single will. The bishops and priests, whose appointment the Concordat transferred from their congregations to the Government, were as much instruments of the First Consul as his prefects and his gendarmes. The spiritual wants of the public, the craving of the poor for religious consolation, were made the pretext for introducing the new theological police. But the situation of the Catholic Church was in reality no worse in France at the commencement of the Consulate than its present situation in Ireland. The Republic had indeed subjected the non-juring priests to the heaviest penalties, but the exercise of Christian worship, which, even in the Reign of Terror, had only been interrupted by local and individual fanaticism, had long recovered the protection of the law, services in the open air being alone prohibited. [99] Since 1795 the local authorities had been compelled to admit the religious societies of their district to the use of church-buildings. Though the coup d'état of Fructidor, 1797, renewed the persecution of non-juring priests, it in no way checked the activity of the Constitutional Church, now free from all connection with the Civil Government. While the non-juring priests, exiled as political offenders, or theatrically adoring the sacred elements in the woods, pretended that the age of the martyrs had returned to France, a Constitutional Church, ministering in 4,000 parishes, unprivileged but unharassed by the State, supplied the nation with an earnest and respectable body of clergy. [100] But in the eyes of the First Consul everything left to voluntary association was so much lost to the central power. In the order of nature, peasants must obey priests, priests must obey bishops, and bishops must obey the First Consul. An alliance with the Pope offered to Bonaparte the means of supplanting the popular organisation of the Constitutional Church by an imposing hierarchy, rigid in its orthodoxy and unquestioning in its devotion to himself. In return for the consecration of his own rule, Bonaparte did not shrink from inviting the Pope to an exercise of authority such as the Holy See had never even claimed in France. The whole of the existing French Bishops, both the exiled non-jurors and those of the Constitutional Church, were summoned to resign their Sees into the hands of the Pope; against all who refused to do so sentence of deposition was pronounced by the Pontiff, without a word heard in defence, or the shadow of a fault alleged. The Sees were re-organised, and filled up by nominees of the First Consul. The position of the great body of the clergy was substantially altered in its relation to the Bishops. Episcopal power was made despotic, like all other