At the King’s deposition this decree took place, and such of the nonjuring priests as were not massacred in the prisons, or escaped the search, were to be embarked for Guiana.  The wiser and better part of those whose compliances entitled them to remain, were, I believe, far from considering this persecution of their opponents as a triumph—­to those who did, it was of short duration.  The Convention, which had hitherto attempted to disguise its hatred of the profession by censure and abuse of a part of its members, began now to ridicule the profession itself:  some represented it as useless—­others as pernicious and irreconcileable with political freedom; and a discourse* was printed, under the sanction of the Assembly, to prove, that the only feasible republic must be supported by pure atheism.

     * Extracts from the Report of Anacharsis Cloots, member of the
     Committee of Public Instruction, printed by order of the National
     Convention: 

“Our Sans-culottes want no other sermon but the rights of man, no other doctrine but the constitutional precepts and practice, nor any other church than where the section or the club hold their meetings, &c.

“The propagation of the rights of man ought to be presented to the astonished world pure and without stain.  It is not by offering strange gods to our neighbours that we shall operate their conversion.  We can never raise them from their abject state by erecting one altar in opposition to another.  A trifling heresy is infinitely more revolting than having no religion at all.  Nature, like the sun, diffuses her light without the assistance of priests and vestals.  While we were constitutional heretics, we maintained an army of an hundred thousand priests, who waged war equally with the Pope and the disciples of Calvin.  We crushed the old priesthood by means of the new, and while we compelled every sect to contribute to the payment of a pretended national religion, we became at once the abhorrence of all the Catholics and Protestants in Europe.  The repulsion of our religious belief counteracted the attraction of our political principles.—­But truth is at length triumphant, and all the ill-intentioned shall no more be able to detach our neighbours from the dominion of the rights of man, under pretext of a religious dominion which no longer exists.—­The purpose of religion is no how so well answered as by presenting carte blanche to the abused world.  Every one will then be at liberty to form his spiritual regimen to his own taste, till in the end the invincible ascendant of reason shall teach him that the Supreme Being, the Eternal Being, is no other than Nature uncreated and uncreatable; and that the only Providence is the association of mankind in freedom and equality!—­ This sovereign providence affords comfort to the afflicted, rewards the good, and punishes the wicked.  It exercises no unjust partialities, like the