on the streets; the sinister words, Propriété Nationale, imprinted in large characters on the walls, everywhere showed how far the work of confiscation' had proceeded. 15. Passengers hesitated to address their most intimate friends on meeting; the extent of calamity had rendered men suspicious even of those they loved the most. Every one assumed the coarsest dress and the most squalid appearance; an elegant exterior would have been the certain forerunner of destruction. At one hour only were any symptoms of animation to be seen; it was when the victims were conveyed to execution; the humane fled with horror from the sight; the infuriated rushed in crowds to satiate their eyes with the sight of human agony. 16. Night came, but with it no diminution of the anxiety of the people. Every family early assembled its members; with trembling looks they gazed round the room, fearful that the very walls might harbor traitors. The sound of a foot, the stroke of a hammer, a voice in the street, froze all hearts with horror. If a knock was heard at the door, every one, in agonized suspense, expected his fate. Unable to endure such protracted misery, numbers committed suicide. "Had the reign of Robespierre," says Freron, "continued longer, multitudes would have thrown themselves under the guillotine: the first of social affections, the love of life, was already extinguished in almost every heart." 17. In the midst of these unparalleled atrocities, the Convention were occupied with the establishment of the civic virtues. Robespierre pronounced a discourse on the qualities suited to a republic. He dedicated a certain number of the decennial fêtes to the Supreme Being, to Truth, to Justice, to Modesty, to Friendship, to Frugality, to Good Faith, to Glory, to Immortality! Baure prepared a report on the suppression of mendicity, and the means of relieving the indigent poor. Robespierre had now reached the zenith of his popularity with his faction; he was denominated the Great Man of the Republic; his virtue, his genius, his eloquence, were in every mouth. Abolition of Christianity in France.-Smyth. [Among the extraordinary incidents of the French Revolution, perhaps the most awful was the public "abolition of Christianity," and the formal establishment of Atheism. To such a dreadful excess did the minds of those remorseless destroyers of every human and divine institution proceed who had obtained control of the government during the period of the "Reign of Terror." The event and its consequences present a memorable lesson to mankiud, which the following extract from Dr. Smyth's Lectures on the French Revolution" will serve to point out and impress.] 1. As it is a memorable fact in the history of civilized man, that the progress of the new opinions should go so far as at last publicly to throw off all belief of a Creator and a future life, so is it also a memorable fact, that such an apostasy from all the common principles and feelings of mankind could not long subsist; and that it was thought necessary by the great demagogue of the hour [Robespierre] to restore the national creed, if not to Christianity, to the great doctrines at least of natural religion. 2. A report was made by Robespierre to the Convention on the 7th of May, 1794, and this was intended by him to be introductory to his decree for the acknowledgment of the exist ence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. It was full of the most extraordinary matter; but in the midst of much declamation and invective against governments, traitors to the Revolution, priests and priestcraft, appear the following paragraphs, in which he speaks against Hebert and the followers of the atheistical school, the party he had just put down. 3. "These pretended patriots,” he says, "have erected their immorality not only into a sort of system, but a sort of religion; they have endeavored to destroy all the generous sentiments of nature, by their example as by their precepts; they have searched into the human mind and the human heart; they have endeavored to find everything that could be a support to morals, but only to tear it away, only to stifle the prin "Every tenth day [the Sabbath had been abolished] a revolutionary leader ascended the pulpit and preached atheism to the bewildered audience. Marat was universally deified, and even the instru rent of death was sanctified by the name of the Holy Guillotine! On all the public cemeteries this inscription was placed: Death is an eternal sleep.”—Alisor. ciple of conscience, the invisible accuser that nature has there concealed. But consult you, consult only the welfare of your country and the interests of humanity. Reject all those which grand moral ideas which Who then has commis 4. "Every institution, every doctrine which consoles and elevates the soul, should be welcomed. tend but to degrade and corrupt it. Reanimate and exalt all those generous sentiments and those they have attempted to extinguish. sioned thee to announce to the people that the Divinity does not exist, thou, thou who canst feel such a passion for this arid doctrine, yet canst feel none for thy country; and what benefit to thee, to persuade mankind that a blind force presides over their destinies, and strikes at random crime and virtue that the soul is but a passing breath that exists not beyond the portals of the tomb? 5. "The notion of his annihilation, will it inspire a man with sentiments more pure and more elevated than the belief of his immortality! Will it inspire him with more respect for his fellow-men and for himself; with more devotedness to his country, more boldness to brave tyranny, or a better contempt for pleasure and for death? You, who regret the vir tuous friend that you have lost; you, who love to think that the nobler part of him has escaped from destruction; you, who shed tears over the bier of your son or the lost partner of your heart, are you consoled by him who tells you that there remains of them nothing but a vile heap of dust? 6. "Wretched man that thou art, thou who art expiring under the stroke of the assassin, thy last sigh is an appeal to eternal justice! Innocence even on the scaffold can make the tyrant turn pale, though seated in his car of victory and triumph; and where would be this ascendant if indeed the tomb could render equal the oppressor and the oppressed? Miserable sophister that thou art! by what right dost thou come to wrest from innocence the sceptre of reason, and place it in the hands of guilt, throw a funeral pall over nature, make vice look up with joy, and virtue droop in sorrow? 7. “Why is humanity to be degraded? The more a man is endowed with sensibility and genius, the more is he attached to those ideas that ennoble his nature and elevate his heart; and the doctrines of such men become the doctrines of the universe. And how is it to be supposed that such ideas are not truths? I cannot conceive, at least, how nature can have suggested to man fictions more useful than all her realities; and if the existence of the Deity and the immortality of the soul be indeed but dreams, they are, of all the conceptions of the human mind, the most beautiful. 8. "The great point for the morals of society would be to create a rapid instinct, that, without the tardy succor of reason, should lead men to seek good and avoid evil; but the reason of each man is drawn aside by his passions, or is often little better than a sophist that pleads their cause; and the authority of man over himself may always be assailed by his self-love. Now what produces or replaces this precious instinct, what supplies this insufficiency of human authority, is the religious sentiment which impresses upon the mind the idea of a sanction given to the precepts of morality, by a power superior to man; and I know not that any legislator has ever thought of turning his nation to atheism. 9. "I know, indeed, that sages have mingled fictions with truth to strike the imagination of the people, or attach them to their institutions. Lycurgus and Solon had their oracles, and Socrates his familiar genius. But you will not conclude from this that you must deceive men to instruct them, but only that you are fortunate to live in an age and in a country where the progress in knowledge leaves you no other task to fulfill than to recall man to nature and to truth. You will be careful, then, how you break the link that unites men to the Author of their being. 10. "It is even sufficient that this opinion has obtained among a people to make it dangerous to destroy it; for the motives of every duty and the foundations of morality being connected with this idea, to destroy it is to demoralize the people. On the whole, he who could form a substitute for the Divinity, in the system of social life, would be a prodigy of genius; he who, without having anything to substitute, thinks only of banishing the Divinity from the human mind, appears to me but a prodigy of stupidity or perverseness. If the principles which I have thus developed are mistaken, I deceive myself at least with all whom the world has yet revered. Cicero in the Senate, Socrates when dying, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, the man truly great, the real hero, esteems himself too well not to turn away from the idea of his own annihilation. The wretch who is despicable in his own eyes, who is horrible in the eyes of others, is aware that nature has for him no better present to bestow." 11. Such are the sentiments expressed by Robespierre. This report embraced a variety of strange topics; "but all of it," says the editor [of the Moniteur, a journal published in Paris at the time], "that appeared to do homage to Nature, and the virtue she inspires, received, at every turn, marks the most decided of general applause; and it was amidst such acclamations that the decrees that followed were proclaimed: That the French people acknowledged the existence of the Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul; that a fête should be celebrated in honor of the Supreme Being."" [Accordingly, on the 8th of June following, the decreed fête was given, Robespierre being the high-priest of the occasion. Of course it was a dreadful farce, although the painter David had the direction of the ceremonial, which consisted principally in a formal conflagration of the statues of Atheism and Discord, and honors to that of Wisdom. On the 29th of July following [1794], Robespierre was conducted to the scaffold and guillotined on the very spot where Louis XVI. and his hapless queen had suffered death.] Character and Career of Robespierre.-Lamartine. [From the "History of the Girondists."] 1. ROBESPIERRE's death was the date, not the cause of the cessation of Terror. Deaths would have ceased by his triumphs, as they did by his death. Thus did divine justice dishonor his repentance and cast misfortune on his good intentions, making of his tomb a gulf filled up. It has made-of his memory an enigma of which history trembles to pronounce the solution, fearing to do him injustice if she brand it as |