nd gradually
undertaken, since the time of Charlemagne,--the philosophers of the
second school, the irreligious school, the atheistic school, of Diderot
and Helvetius, drove the masses from stupidity even to impiety, and the
demagogues of '93 forced them from impiety to Atheism, and from Atheism
to blood. Demagogues, those poisoners of liberty, corrupt every
revolution in which they mingle; they defile every thing that they
touch; they dishonor every truth which they profess, by polluting or
perverting it. The age and philosophy, Heaven and earth, desire what
we too desire,--freedom of conscience, voluntary worship,--liberty of
the human mind in matters of faith,--the fraternity of altars,
invoking, each in its own language, that God whom the whole earth is
spelling out, and who reveals, from age to age, still another letter of
His divine name.

Instead of this, Atheists and demagogues united to persecute religion,
to revenge themselves for the old persecutions of the priesthood. They
profaned the temples, violated conscience, blasphemed the God of the
faithful, parodied the ceremonies, cast to the winds the pious symbols
of worship, and persecuted the ministers of religion.

In the name of the Revolution, and under the menace of terror, they
dragged the People to these Saturnalia. They corrupted the eyes, the
hands, the minds, the souls of the populace. These violences to the
altar were cast back on the religious idea itself. The People, seeing
the temple fall, believed that Heaven itself crumbled; and that,
following the profaned image of a vanishing worship, God himself would
vanish from the world, with conscience, the supernatural law, the
unwritten moral law, the soul and the immortality of the human race!

When the ignorant People no longer saw God between them and
annihilation, they plunged into the boundless and bottomless abyss of
Atheism, they lost their divine sense, they became brutal as the
animal, who sees in the earth only a pasture ground, instead of the
footstool of Jehovah.

But these irreligious abominations, and these Saturnalia of Atheism,
however much injury they inflicted on the religious spirit of the
People, did not effect so much, perhaps, as the reign which followed
this anarchy, the reign of Bonaparte, the so-called restorer of
worship. And how?

XII.

The Republic had passed its paroxysm of fever, of demagoguical
madness, of persecution. The Directory had finally concentrated