The Government will secure a suitable salary to the bishops, and to parish priests whose dioceses and parishes are comprised in the new circumscription. Article XV. The Government will also take measures to enable French Catholics, when so disposed, to create foundations in favor of churches. Article XVI. His Holiness recognizes, in the First Consul of the French Republic, the same rights and prerogatives enjoyed at Rome by the former Government. Article XVII. It is agreed between the contracting parties that in case any successor of the present First Consul should not be a Catholic, the rights and prerogatives mentioned in the preceding article, and the nominations to Sees, shall be regulated, so far as he is concerned, by a new convention. The ratifications to be exchanged at Paris within forty days. Done at Paris, 26th Messidor, year IX. of the French Republic, July 15th, 1801. H. CARDINAL CONSALVI, J. BONAPARTE, J. ARCHEVEQUE de CORINTHE, FR. CHARLES CASELLI, CRETET, BERNIER. Upon its appearance, the new treaty was naturally subjected to criticism, adverse and favorable. That it meant a decided victory for the Church over her old enemies was admitted on all sides, and all hostility to its prescriptions could be reduced to the murmurings of the Royalists, the émigrés, the Gallicans, the constitutionals and the various revolutionary parties. By the great mass of the Catholic people it was hailed as a rainbow of promise after the desolating storms of the past ten years. "According to its first article the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion was to be exercised freely in France; the Catholic Church was therefore to be free in her organization, free in her preaching and teaching, free in her discipline, in her ministers, in her right of acquiring such property as would be necessary for the accomplishing of her mission. She is no longer as under the old regime, intimately allied with the State; she is no longer the Church of the State; the separation of the temporal and the spiritual has been effected.... But if in return one considers the words of the text according to their real value, she is entirely free; she need no longer fear trespassing from outside nor a supervision that tends only to hinder her action; nor those thousand and one interferences which were formerly perpetrated by Gallicanism."