Unfortunately, these views were not disappointed:  conviction, interest, or fear, prevailed on many to take the oath; while doubt, worldly improvidence, or a scrupulous piety, deterred others.  A schism took place between the jurors and nonjurors—­the people became equally divided, and adhered either to the one or the other, as their habits or prepossessions directed them.  Neither party, as it may be imagined, could see themselves deprived of any portion of the public esteem, without concern, perhaps without rancour; and their mutual animosity, far from gaining proselytes to either, contributed only to the immediate degradation and future ruin of both.  Those, however, who had not taken the prescribed oath, were in general more popular than what were called the constitutionalists, and the influence they were supposed to exert in alienating the minds of their followers from the new form of government, supplied the republican party with a pretext for proposing their banishment.*

     The King’s exertion of the power vested in him by the constitution,
     by putting a temporary negative on this decree, it is well known,
     was one of the pretexts for dethroning him.

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