If you will permit me to press upon you such high motives (and it were to be wished that in every action we were to be influenced by the highest) perhaps no act of bounty to which you may be called out, can ever come so immediately under that solemn and affecting description, which will be recorded in the great day of account--_I was a stranger and ye took me in_.---- [Decoration] _The following is an exact Translation from a_ SPEECH _made in the National Convention at Paris, on Friday the 14th of December, 1792, in a Debate on the Subject of establishing Public Schools for the Education of Youth, by Citizen_ DUPONT, _a Member of considerable Weight; and as the Doctrines contained in it were received with unanimous Applause, except from two or three of the Clergy, it may be fairly considered as an Exposition of the Creed of that Enlightened Assembly. Translated from_ Le Moniteur _of Sunday the 16th of December, 1792_. [Decoration] What! Thrones are overturned! Sceptres broken! Kings expire! And yet the Altars of GOD remain! (Here there is a murmur from some Members; and the Abbe ICHON demands that the person speaking may be called to order.) Tyrants, in outrage to nature, continue to burn an impious incense on those Altars! (Some murmurs arise, but they are lost in the applauses from the majority of the Assembly.) The Thrones that have been reversed, have left these Altars naked, unsupported, and tottering. A single breath of enlightened reason will now be sufficient to make them disappear; and if humanity is under obligations to the French nation for the first of these benefits, the fall of Kings, can it be doubted but that the French people, now sovereign, will be wise enough, in like manner, to overthrow those Altars and _those Idols_ to which those Kings have hitherto made them subject? _Nature_ and _Reason_, these ought to be the gods of men! These are my gods! (Here the Abbe AUDREIN cried out, "There is no bearing this;" and rushed out of the Assembly.--A great laugh.) Admire _nature_--cultivate _reason_. And you, Legislators, if you desire that the French people should be happy, make haste to propagate these principles, and to teach them in your primary schools, instead of those fanatical principles which have hitherto been taught. The tyranny of Kings was confined to make their people miserable in this life--but those other tyrants, the Priests, extend their dominion into another, of which they have no other idea than of eternal punishments; a doctrine which some men have hitherto had the good nature to believe. But the moment of the catastrophe is come--all these prejudices must fall at the same time. _We must destroy them, or they will destroy us._--For myself, I honestly avow to the Convention, _I am an atheist_! (Here there is some noise and tumult. But a great number of members cry out, "What is that to us--you are an honest man!") But I defy a single individual, among the twenty-four millions of Frenchmen, to make against