It was to him, when the shadow of death was hovering round the smitten rock, that Napoleon conveyed his most sacred thoughts, domestic, civil, and religious.  He made him one of his executors, bequeathed to him a fortune, entrusted him with the custody of precious documents, and to his dying day the recipient of such flattering confidences never betrayed by word or act the faith that was reposed in him, nor did he ever falter in his devotion to the martyr’s cause.  It is from him we have handed down the famous constitution drawn up by Napoleon for his son, which is pregnant with democratic wisdom and flows with the genius of statesmanship.  We get, too, a vivid knowledge of the religious side of Napoleon’s versatile character.  His talks and dictations on this controversial subject are unorthodox if you like, but nevertheless religious; copious in thought and trenchant in vocabulary, they disclose the magic of a well-stored inspired mind.  He indulges in neither puerilities nor conventionalities.  He is a vigorous student of the Bible and the Koran; he knows his subject, and speaks his reasonings without reservation, and in the end we see the vision of the omnipotent God fixed in an enduring belief.

In the first clause of his will he declares:  “I die in the Apostolic Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years since.”  If any other proof were needed that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, this avowed declaration on the eve of the great transformation may be confirmed by the fact that the cardinal doctrine of the Roman religion centres in the divinity of Christ.  Again, in the course of his public and private duties, you frequently come across passages in his letters and official documents such as “May God have you in His holy keeping.”  It may be said that this is a mere form or figure of speech but then unbelievers do not use such phrases.

We find in everyday life a lack of courage to do justice and be generous to one another.  But surely, in the interest of political, historical, and personal rectitude, the dying man’s message to the world should absolve him from having his lucid, succinct conversations jargoned into a tattered tedium.  It is either a perversion of understanding or a misanthropic egoism that can twist Napoleon’s discourses on religious topics into meaning that he ever was seriously thinking of giving preference to the worship of the sun, or contemplating becoming a follower of Mohammed, or that he ever showed real evidences of being an unbeliever in the God of his race.

He praised many of the virtues of the Mohammedan religion, such as honesty, cleanliness, temperance, and devoutness, and denounced with scathing sarcasm, not Christ, but professing Christians whose conduct towards himself was beneath the dignity of the pagan.  But this in no way detracts from his admiration of the genuine follower of Christ.  He says that “religious ideas have more influence than certain narrow-minded philosophers are willing to believe; they are capable of rendering great services to humanity.”  Again, he says that “the Christian religion is the religion of a civilised people; it is entirely spiritual, and the reward which Jesus Christ promises to the elect is that they shall see God face to face; and its whole tendency is to subdue the passions; it offers nothing to excite them.”