At that time he had few thoughts of any glory but military glory. Young men were taught that the only path to renown was to be found through fields of blood. All the peaceful arts of life, which tend to embellish the world with competence and refinement, were despised. He only was the chivalric gentleman, whose career was marked by conflagrations and smouldering ruins, by the despair of the maiden, the tears and woe of widows and orphans, and by the shrieks of the wounded and the dying. Such was the school in which Napoleon was trained. The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau had taught France, that the religion of Jesus Christ was but a fable; that the idea of accountability at the bar of God was a foolish superstition; that death was a sleep from which there was no awaking; that life itself, aimless and objectless, was so worthless a thing that it was a matter of most trivial importance how soon its vapor should pass away. These peculiarities in the education of Napoleon must be taken into account in forming a correct estimate of his character. It could hardly be said that he was educated in a Christian land. France renounced Christianity and plunged into the blackest of Pagan darkness, without any religion, and without a God. Though the altars of religion were not, at this time, entirely swept away, they were thoroughly undermined by that torrent of infidelity which, in crested billows, was surging over the land. Napoleon had but little regard for the lives of others and still less for his own. He never commanded the meanest soldier to go where he was not willing to lead him. Having never been taught any correct ideas of probation or retribution, the question whether a few thousand illiterate peasants, should eat, drink, and sleep for a few years more or less, was in his view of little importance compared with those great measures of political wisdom which should meliorate the condition of Europe for ages. It is Christianity alone which stamps importance upon each individual life, and which invests the apparent trivialities of time with the sublimities of eternity. It is, indeed, strange that Napoleon, graduating at the schools of infidelity and of war, should have cherished so much of the spirit of humanity, and should have formed so many just conceptions of right and wrong. It is, indeed, strange that surrounded by so many allurements to entice him to voluptuous indulgence and self-abandonment, he should have retained a character, so immeasurably superior in all moral worth, to that of nearly all the crowned heads who occupied the thrones around him.