of believers.  The theocratic reaction was prompt and universal, as it ought to have been.  Impiety clears the soul of its consecrated errors, but does not fill the heart of man.  Impiety alone will never ruin a human worship:  a faith destroyed must be replaced by a faith.  It is not given to irreligion to destroy a religion on earth.  There is but a religion more enlightened which can really triumph over a religion fallen into contempt, by replacing it.  The earth cannot remain without an altar, and God alone is strong enough against God.

VIII.

It was on the 5th of August, 1791, the first anniversary of the famous night of the 4th of August, 1790, when feudality crumbled to atoms, that the National Assembly commenced the revision of the constitution.  It was a solemn and imposing act, was this comprehensive coup d’oeil cast by legislators at the end of their career, over the ruins they had scattered, and the foundations they had laid in their course.  But how different at this moment was the disposition of their mind from what they felt in commencing this mighty work!  They had begun it with an enthusiasm of the ideal, they now contemplated it with the misgivings and the sadness of reality.  The National Assembly was opened amidst the acclamations of a people unanimous in their hopes, and was about to close amidst the clamorous recriminations of all parties.

The king was captive, the princes emigrants, the clergy at feud, the nobility in flight, the people seditious; Necker’s popularity had vanished, Mirabeau was dead, Maury silenced, Cazales, Lally, Mounier had deserted from their work.  Two years had carried off more men and things than a generation removes in ordinary times.  The great voices of ’89, inspired with philosophy and vast hopes, no longer resounded beneath those vaults.  The foremost ranks had fallen.  The men of second order were now to contend in their stead.  Intimidated, discouraged, repentant, they had neither the spirit to yield to the impulse of the people nor the power to resist it.  Barnave had recovered his virtue in his sensibility; but virtue which comes late is like the experience which follows the act, and only enables us to measure the extent of our errors.  In revolutions there is no repentance—­there is only expiation.  Barnave, who might have saved the monarchy, had he only united with Mirabeau, was just commencing his expiatory sentence.  Robespierre was to Barnave what Barnave had been to Mirabeau; but Robespierre, more powerful than Barnave, instead of acting on the impulse of a passion as fluctuating as jealousy, acted under the influence of a fixed idea, and an unalterable theory.  Robespierre had the whole people at his back.

IX.