h sabres and bayonets, and with such
haste and zeal, that some of the jailers and assistants were slain along
with those whom they had assisted in dragging to death; and the mistake
was not discerned, until, upon counting the dead bodies, the military
murderers found them to amount to more than the destined tale. The
bodies of the dead were thrown into the Rhone, to carry news of the
republican vengeance, as Collot D'Herbois expressed himself, to Toulon,
then also in a state of revolt. But the sullen stream rejected the
office imposed on it, and headed back the dead in heaps upon the banks;
and the committee of Representatives was compelled at length to allow
the relics of their cruelty to be interred, to prevent the risk of
contagion.

_The Installation of the Goddess of Reason._

At length the zeal of the infuriated Atheists in France hurried them to
the perpetration of one of the most ridiculous, and at the same time
impious transactions which ever disgraced the annals of any nation. It
was no less than a formal renunciation of the existence of a Supreme
Being, and the installation of the _Goddess of Reason_, in 1793.

"There is," says Scott, "a fanaticism of atheism, as well as of
superstitious belief; and a philosopher can harbour and express as much
malice against those who persevere in believing what he is pleased to
denounce as unworthy of credence, as an ignorant and bigoted priest can
bear against a man who cannot yield faith to dogmata which he thinks
insufficiently proved." Accordingly, the throne being totally
annihilated, it appeared to the philosophers of the school of Hebert,
(who was author of the most gross and beastly periodical paper of the
time, called the _Pere du Chene_) that in totally destroying such
vestiges of religion and public worship as were still retained by the
people of France, there was room for a splendid triumph of liberal
opinions. It was not enough, they said, for a regenerate nation to have
dethroned earthly kings, unless she stretched out the arm of defiance
towards those powers which superstition had represented as reigning over
boundless space.

An unhappy man, named Gobet, constitutional bishop of Paris, was brought
forward to play the principal part in the most impudent and scandalous
farce ever acted in the face of a national representation.

It is said that the leaders of the scene had some difficulty in inducing
the bishop to comply with the task assigned him, which