elf, or in other words to the idea of an
incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort
of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all
so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'

This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as
statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most
odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed
practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If
Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too
shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high
festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master
of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition
in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the
priest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest
of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall
be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'

There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hebertists still kept
their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally
impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force
had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris
insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles
in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to
strive with all their might to build a new government out of the
agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the
battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against
atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes.
The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
wings of the genius of demonic Hate. _Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni_;
the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church
settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the
fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old
Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet