bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual
acquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.

Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of
Reason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,
Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the
conditions. 'You,' he might have said to the priests,--'you have so
debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams,
that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the
yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be
generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that you
can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among
you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the
poisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions,--its bribes to
mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its
tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace
at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still
humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise
away from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed
finality and leaden moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on your
flank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We will
not attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall
explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below
a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his
species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from
being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a
chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry
it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the
daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will
gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn
their backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, but
because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden
with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk,
with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work i