Behind this impenetrable screen the activities of the Emperor were resumed with a greater intensity and a higher velocity than ever. Not content with a daily task, his hours of recreation became shorter and shorter, until he ceased to have any capacity for pleasure, and found no comfort for his mind except in labor. Paris was in raptures of loyalty, and from every conceivable source came proposals for triumphs, statues, or other honors to "Napoleon the Great." The Church vied with the populace. Among many similar utterances one bishop declared the Emperor to be the chosen of God to restore His worship and lead His people; another announced that recent events, occurring on the anniversary of the coronation, had given Napoleon a divine character; while the cardinal archbishop of Paris cried aloud, "O God of Marengo, thou declarest thyself the God of Austerlitz; and the German eagle with the Russian eagle, both of which thou dost desert, is become the prey of the French eagle, which thou ceasest not to protect." Before long the monarch was everywhere called the "man of God, the anointed of the Lord," and occasionally he was designated as "his sacred Majesty." Opportunity was therefore ripe for radical changes. "My house," "my line," "my people," were phrases which had for a year past been on the Emperor's lips and in his letters. He now began to take measures for lending a theocratic character to his reign, which, in view of his religious belief, were simply shocking. Not only did he express the wish that his imperial standards should be regarded with "religious reverence," but he closed his letters with the royal, absolutist, and Roman Catholic formula, "I pray God to have you in his holy keeping," and was styled in public papers, "Napoleon, by the Grace of God Emperor." For this he could of course make no other plea than the universal though antiquated customs of the existing European dynasties, which still claimed to reign by divine right. But he went further, and in personal coöperation with an obsequious church dignitary prepared a catechism from which every French child learned in a few months such medieval and now blasphemous dogmas as these: Napoleon is "the minister of the power of God, and his image on earth"; "to honor and serve the Emperor is to honor and serve God." The climax of this insincerity was to be found in the awful menace, instilled with absolute solemnity into the mind of every learner throughout all the dioceses, that as to disobey the Emperor was to resist the order ordained by God, such disobedience would prepare eternal damnation for the guilty. Although Napoleon ever refused to admit that he himself had any moral responsibility, and seemed to act on the doctrine that he had been born what he remained to the end, he nevertheless attributed immense influence to education in others. "There can be no settled politics," he said of the university, "without a settled body of teachers."