political but religious also.

It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence and
confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all his
love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literary
statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to see
the practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying point
for material order was incessantly changing; and Robespierre turned to
different quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was only
able to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in the
government, by virtue of his influence over the various sections of
possible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official,
influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truth
Robespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by his
rhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently before
the public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many
limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech
from him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have been
disrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries,
or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We
naturally think of those grave men who a few years before had founded
the republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in the
Virginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards
said that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;
while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority that
for eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did not
make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never a
short one.

Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly was
due to his truly Philistine respectability and to his literary faculty.
He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the most
iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar,
provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from
the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle