tered it, consisted only in gorgeous pageants, and ridiculous
dogmas, and puerile traditions. The spirit of piety and pure devotion
she could admire. Her natural temperament was serious, reflective, and
prayerful. Her mind, so far as religion was concerned, was very much
in the state of that of any intellectual, high-minded, uncorruptible
Roman, who renounced, without opposing, the idolatry of the benighted
multitude; who groped painfully for some revelation of God and of
truth; who at times believed fully in a superintending providence, and
again had fears whether there were any God or any immortality. In the
processions, the relics, the grotesque garb, and the spiritual
terrors wielded by the Roman Catholic priesthood, she could behold but
barefaced deception. The papal system appeared to her but as a
colossal monster, oppressing the people with hideous superstition, and
sustaining, with its superhuman energies, the corruption of the nobles
and of the throne. In rejecting this system, she had no friend to
conduct her to the warm, sheltered, and congenial retreats of
evangelical piety. She was led almost inevitably, by the philosophy of
the times, to those chilling, barren, storm-swept heights, where the
soul can find no shelter but in its own indomitable energies of
endurance. These energies Madame Roland displayed in such a degree as
to give her a name among the very first of those in any age who by
_heroism_ have shed luster upon human nature.

Under the influence of these feelings, she came to the conclusion that
it would be more honorable for her to die by her own hand than to be
dragged to the guillotine by her foes. She obtained some poison, and
sat down calmly to write her last thoughts, and her last messages of
love, before she should plunge into the deep mystery of the unknown.
There is something exceedingly affecting in the vague and shadowy
prayer which she offered on this occasion. It betrays a painful
uncertainty whether there were any superintending Deity to hear her
cry, and yet it was the soul's instinctive breathing for a support
higher and holier than could be found within itself.

"Divinity! Supreme Being! Spirit of the Universe! great principle of
all that I feel great, or good, or immortal within myself--whose
existence I believe in, because I must have emanated from something
superior to that by which I am surrounded--I am about to reunite
myself to thy essence." In her farewell note to her husb