t are no more than
ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
bottom.'

Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's minds
to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell
through all distractions. None of these high things were said. The
temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priests
maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated the
policy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and
democratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist Catholicism.

* * * * *

Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists.
They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflicted
him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hebert, however,
was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did
Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its
partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of
November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The
Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none
of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said,
'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes
to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man
or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred
times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The
Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to
no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in
presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a
narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I
have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people.
_Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over
oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the
idea of the people._ This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;
it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached
neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is
attached only to worship in its