te society
as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--its
pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke for
the service of men.

If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
Being--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--should
adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald
article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
touching of human relations,--a tender mother ever interceding for them,
and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
loosened.'

* * * * *

On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentie