night-sitting."[256] Rousseau’s ideas fell among men who were most potent and corporeal burgomasters.  In the winter of 1793 two parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean party of the Commune, named improperly after Hebert, but whose best member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by Robespierre.  The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the 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.