The Concordat signed and ratified Catholic France settled down to the enjoyment of comparative peace and security. It was, however, only the security which follows the ravages of disease, the peace of convalescence, full of weariness, languor and exhaustion. The fifty bishops installed by the new decrees could not help a feeling of discouragement as they viewed the situation. The Church, it is true, was brought back to a position of honor and importance in the nation; but it was, at the same time, weighed down by the heavy burdens of Gallicanism and Caesarism; the former severing the ties that bound it to the head and centre of Christianity, the Holy Father; the latter making it subservient to the whims and fancies of a ruler, human at most and liable through the schemes of politics to be hostile and intolerant. The former was suited to the imperialistic ambitions of Bonaparte, who had already begun to dream of the glories of the old regime; the latter was couched in the fraudulent laws of the Organic Articles; the former was to lose its force before the lapse of half a century; the latter was to last as long as the Concordat itself. Thus it was that the outlook at the beginning of the century was little favorable to the just execution of the Concordat. With all correspondence with Rome interdicted save under civil surveillance, deprived of the right of assemblage, and bound by slavish ties to a State official who alone could administer, reward, punish, teach, or cause to teach, according to his own pleasure, all true liberty seemed to have vanished as completely as during the dark times of the Revolution. With churches, schools and colleges under the direction of politicians, the right of ecclesiastical censure denied, and the number of aspirants to the priesthood limited, the religious society of France had become little more than an annex to the State, inferior in importance and subordinate to it in all things. The religious congregations were dispersed, the missionaries were forbidden to exercise their zeal, and for the thirty millions of Catholics in the country there were only eight thousand priests of whom fully two thousand bore the taint of the constitutional oath.