In this tirade we see the youth’s spirit of revolt flinging him not only against French law, but against the religion which sanctions it.  He sees none of the beauty of the Gospels which Rousseau had admitted.  His views are more rigid than those of his teacher.  Scarcely can he conceive of two influences, the spiritual and the governmental, working on parallel lines, on different parts of man’s nature.  His conception of human society is that of an indivisible, indistinguishable whole, wherein materialism, tinged now and again by religious sentiment and personal honour, is the sole noteworthy influence.  He finds no worth in a religion which seeks to work from within to without, which aims at transforming character, and thus transforming the world.  In its headlong quest of tangible results his eager spirit scorns so tardy a method:  he will “compel men to be happy,” and for this result there is but one practicable means, the Social Contract, the State.  Everything which mars the unity of the Social Contract shall be shattered, so that the State may have a clear field for the exercise of its beneficent despotism.  Such is Buonaparte’s political and religious creed at the age of seventeen, and such it remained (with many reservations suggested by maturer thought and self-interest) to the end of his days.  It reappears in his policy anent the Concordat of 1802, by which religion was reduced to the level of handmaid to the State, as also in his frequent assertions that he would never have quite the same power as the Czar and the Sultan, because he had not undivided sway over the consciences of his people.[10] In this boyish essay we may perhaps discern the fundamental reason of his later failures.  He never completely understood religion, or the enthusiasm which it can evoke; neither did he ever fully realize the complexity of human nature, the many-sidedness of social life, and the limitations that beset the action even of the most intelligent law-maker.[11]

His reading of Rousseau having equipped him for the study of human society and government, he now, during his first sojourn at Auxonne (June, 1788—­September, 1789), proceeds to ransack the records of the ancient and modern world.  Despite ill-health, family troubles, and the outbreak of the French Revolution, he grapples with this portentous task.  The history, geography, religion, and social customs of the ancient Persians, Scythians, Thracians, Athenians, Spartans, Egyptians, and Carthaginians—­all furnished materials for his encyclopaedic note-books.  Nothing came amiss to his summarizing genius.  Here it was that he gained that knowledge of the past which was to astonish his contemporaries.  Side by side with suggestions on regimental discipline and improvements in artillery, we find notes on the opening episodes of Plato’s “Republic,” and a systematic summary of English history from the earliest times down to the Revolution of 1688.  This last event inspired him with special interest, because the Whigs