of symbolism. Robespierre applied
a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and
Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was
hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned
a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the
allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the
churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle.
There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged
sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses
posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing
back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.

The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad
times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
man's most individual attribute. If they could not contempla