s words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
definition of mediocrity.

How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought
that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of
the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of
the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast
of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter.
The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in
their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to
the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre
persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the
Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in
which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8,
1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he
looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in
the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried,
'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale
at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked
at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand,
to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the
first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised
an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared.
Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable
group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them
with lofty wrath. Great are the perils