faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoning
belief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements for
improving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like
the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Miserables_, than to hold those good
opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a
reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow
forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that
lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can
understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the
Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence
as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what
happened. In every family where a mother sought to have her child
baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of
the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy
to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the
priests.

How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the
solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate
priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a
very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to
proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the
Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude
acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold
with which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies,'
Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, the
sword, the strong box, and the _canaille_.' For a moment all these
forces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that they
were as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanation
is that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of the
ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, not
a grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If,
as Chaumette believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely
in that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous
not to