choses doit perseverer, ne parlons plus de l'inquisition, nous en
avons perdu le droit, car la liberte des cultes n'est que dans les
decrets, et la persecution tiraille toute la France.

"Cette impression intolerante aurait elle ete (suggeree) par le
cabinet de St. James?"

"In Turkey the liberty of worship is admitted, though it does not
exist in France. Here the people are deprived of a right common to
the most despotic governments, not even excepting those of Algiers
and Morocco.--If things are to continue in this state, let us say no
more about the Inquisition, we have no right, for religious liberty
is to be found only in our decrees, while, in truth, the whole
country is exposed to persecution.

"May not these intolerant notions have been suggested by the Cabinet
of St. James?"

Gregoire's Report on the Liberty of Worship.

--Thus, after so many years of suffering, and such a waste of whatever is
most valuable, the civil, religious, and political privileges of this
country depend on a vote of the Convention.

The speech of Gregoire, which tended to restore the Catholic worship, was
very ill received by his colleagues, but every where else it is read with
avidity and applause; for, exclusive of its merit as a composition, the
subject is of general interest, and there are few who do not wish to have
the present puerile imitations of Paganism replaced by Christianity. The
Assembly listened to this tolerating oration with impatience, passed to
the order of the day, and called loudly for Decades, with celebrations in
honour of "the liberty of the world, posterity, stoicism, the republic,
and the hatred of tyrants!" But the people, who understand nothing of
this new worship, languish after the saints of their ancestors, and think
St. Francois d'Assise, or St. Francois de Sales, at least as likely to
afford them spiritual consolation, as Carmagnoles, political homilies, or
pasteboard goddesses of liberty.

The failure of Gregoire is far from operating as a discouragement to this
mode of thinking; for such has been the intolerance of the last year,
that his having even ventured to suggest a declaration in favour of free
worship, is deemed a sort of triumph to the pious which has revived their
hopes. Nothing is talked of but the restoration of churches, and
reinstalment of priests--the shops are already open on the Decade, and
the decrees o