public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up
for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries
of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as
the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hebert,
Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the
government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the
soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his
dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship."
And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for
which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),
strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social
Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]

It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not
have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions
of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the
three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.
Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be
required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative
principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound
to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right
thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who
did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and
retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not
believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are
three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the
stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is
concerned with heresy. And Hebert was only following out the same
doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
opinion leads you the whole way.

The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau
closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national
relig