Without reading the speeches of
Vergniaud, Francais of Nantes, Isnard, and some others of that sort, it
would not be easy to conceive the passion, rancor, and malice of their
tongues and hearts. They worked themselves up to a perfect frenzy
against religion and all its professors. They tore the reputation of the
clergy to pieces by their infuriated declamations and invectives, before
they lacerated their bodies by their massacres. This fanatical atheism
left out, we omit the principal feature in the French Revolution, and a
principal consideration with regard to the effects to be expected from a
peace with it.
The other sort of men were the politicians. To them, who had little or
not at all reflected on the subject, religion was in itself no object of
love or hatred. They disbelieved it, and that was all. Neutral with
regard to that object, they took the side which in the present state of
things might best answer their purposes. They soon found that they could
not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made them
sensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with means
of conquest, first at home, and then abroad. The philosophers were the
active internal agitators, and supplied the spirit and principles: the
second gave the practical direction. Sometimes the one predominated in
the composition, sometimes the other. The only difference between them
was in the necessity of concealing the general design for a time, and in
their dealing with foreign nations: the fanatics going straight forward
and openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zigzag.
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