any attempt to reopen one should
be punished by arrest. The decree was put into immediate effect. The
church of Notre Dame and all the other churches of the capital were
closed. The popular measures were now carried on in a kind of rivalry of
destruction. The "Section of the Museum," a portion of the populace,
announced that they had done execution on all Prayer-books, and burnt
the Old and New Testaments. The Council-General of Paris decreed that a
civic feast should be held in the cathedral of Notre Dame, and that a
patriotic hymn should be chanted before the statue of liberty. The
Goddess of Reason was personated by a Madame Momarro, a handsome woman
of profligate character, who was introduced into the hall of the
Convention, received with "the fraternal embrace" by the president and
secretaries, and was then installed by the whole legislature in the
cathedral, which was called the "Regenerated Temple of Reason." In this
monstrous profanation, the apostate archbishop officiated as the high
priest of Reason, with a red cap on his head, and a pike in his hand;
with this weapon he struck down some of the old religious emblems of the
church, and finished his performance by placing a bust of Marat on the
altar. A colossal statue was then ordered to be placed "on the ruins of
monarchy and religion."

This desperate profanation was emulated in the provinces. Fouche, in
Lyons, ordered a civic festival in honour of one Chalier. An ass, with a
mitre on its head, and dragging a Bible at its tail, formed a
characteristic portion of the ceremony; the Bible was finally burnt, and
its ashes scattered to the winds.

"Thus Christianity," said the noble speaker, "was stigmatized, through
the president of the Convention, amid the applauses of the whole
audience, as a system of murder and massacre, incapable of being
tolerated by the humanity of a republican government. The Old and New
Testaments were publicly burnt, as prohibited books. Nor was it to
Christianity that their hatred was confined; the Jews were involved in
this comprehensive plan. Their ornaments of public worship were
plundered, and their vows of irreligion were recorded with enthusiasm.
The existence of a future state was openly denied, and modes of burial
were devised, for the express purpose of representing to the popular
mind, that death was nothing more than an everlasting sleep; and, to
complete the whole project, doctrines were circulated under the eye of
the go