In France there prevails on matters of religion an indifference of feeling, rather than any party contentions, or violent animosities, at least among the greater part of the nation; and so long as the matter is not mixed up with political considerations, this feeling of indifference will bend to one opinion or to the other. Even in former times the religious wars, though violent enough, were not of so long and uninterrupted a duration and so widely destructive a nature, as in Germany, and comparatively speaking at least, were not attended with such frightful circumstances, as in England. But on the other hand, they did not lead to those mighty, definite and permanent results, such as in Germany, a religious pacification--and in England, the establishment of a free Constitution. And in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, accomplished in defiance of all antecedent promises, stipulations and rights, the victory of the Catholic majority of the nation, unjust in itself, was merely apparent and illusive, for all the great problems of moral life remained unsolved, and the hostile and fermenting elements of Protestantism or a species of semi-protestantism retained their full force; till a hundred years after this arbitrary proceeding, an immense and formidable reaction occurred in the breaking out of the great Revolution. That grand conflict of the European nations which sprang out of this Revolution, and attended its whole course, must be looked upon in no other light than as a religious war; for a formal separation not only from the church, but from all Christianity--a total abolition of the Christian religion was an object of this Revolution which lasted nine years, before a sort of religious peace was established, by which it seemed to be acknowledged, that religion, for a time at least, was not an absolutely superfluous want of the people; for the attempt of theophilanthropy, or the public and legal establishment of a pure rationalist religion had no success. But as respected persons, this peace was not of long duration, as was but too soon apparent in the ill-treatment and imprisonment of the head of the church. The drama of the old Ghibelline times was renewed, and Ghibelline principles and maxims of policy were openly avowed. If the military success of the French had been of longer continuance, these principles would have made incomparably greater progress, and would have been more clearly unfolded, as there was a secret inclination to a certain Mahometan junction of civil and ecclesiastical power in the hands of the same person. It could not, however, have escaped the keen perception of Buonaparte, how much the feelings and opinions of Europe, (whatever indifference it may manifest about religion, and however easily it may give its sanction to encroachments on spiritual power, from want of knowledge or of interest in those matters,) are ever adverse to a complete and anti-christian fusion of secular and ecclesiastical authority.