on as a
goddess, was introduced into the Convention, and then led in procession to
the cathedral of Notre Dame; and there, elevated on the high altar, took
the place of deity, and received adoration from the audience. The services
of religion were abandoned; the churches were closed; the sabbath was
abolished; and the calendar altered. On all the public cemeteries the
inscription was placed, "Death is an eternal sleep." Robespierre himself
saw the necessity for the public recognition of the being of a God; and
after the fall of the Girondists, obtained an edict for that purpose
shortly before his death, in 1794; which event marks the return of society
from atheism and materialism back to deism.(589) When the horrors of the
dictatorship of Robespierre closed, and a regular government was
established under the Directory, the priests obtained liberty to reopen
the churches provided they maintained them at their own expense.(590) But
the great majority of the people lived wholly without God in the world;
while some sought refuge in the extravagant creed of a deist sect called
the Theophilanthropists.(591) Nor was it till the year 1802 that Napoleon
was able, and even then amid much opposition, to reestablish the
Sunday.(592) Christianity was then reinaugurated by a public ceremony(593)
in the cathedral, polluted eight years before by the blasphemy of the
goddess of Reason. But the total cessation of religious instruction
snapped asunder a chain of faith which had descended unbroken from the
first ages; and to this must be ascribed the irreligious mode of spending
the Sunday in French society.

The reign of atheism in religion was fortified by a philosophy; and the
works of one infidel writer preserve the expression of the view which it
took of Christianity and religion. As soon as the excitement of the
revolution allowed leisure to return to the study of mental facts, there
arose the extreme form of sensationalism, which was called (in a different
meaning from the present popular use of the term) Ideology, (24). Cabanis
and Destutt de Tracy are the best exponents of its physiological and
psychological aspects; and the well-known Volney of its moral and
religious side. Starting from the principles of Condillac and Helvetius,
that the very faculties as well as ideas are derived from sensation, and
moral rules from self-love, it almost reaches the same point as D'Holbach.
Mental science was approached from the physiological sid