A strong effort was made at this time, by the royalists, for the restoration of the Bourbons. Napoleon, while he despised the inefficient government of the Directory, was by no means willing that the despotic Bourbons should crush the spirit of liberty in France. Napoleon was not adverse to a monarchy. But he wished for a monarch who would consult the interests of the _people_, and not merely pamper the luxury and pride of the nobles. He formed the plan and guided the energies which discomfited the royalists, and sustained the Directors. Thus twice had the strong arm of this young man protected the government. The Directors, in their multiplied perplexities, often urged his presence in their councils, to advise with them on difficult questions. Quiet and reserved he would take his seat at their table, and by that superiority of tact which ever distinguished him, and by that intellectual pre-eminence which could not be questioned, he assumed a moral position far above them all, and guided those gray-haired diplomatists, as a father guides his children. Whenever he entered their presence, he instinctively assumed the supremacy, and it was instinctively recognized. The altars of religion, overthrown by revolutionary violence, still remained prostrate. The churches were closed, the Sabbath abolished, the sacraments were unknown, the priests were in exile. A whole generation had grown up in France without any knowledge of Christianity. Corruption was universal. A new sect sprang up called Theophilanthropists, who gleaned, as the basis of their system, some of the moral precepts of the gospel, divested of the sublime sanctions of Christianity. They soon, however, found that it is not by flowers of rhetoric, and smooth-flowing verses, and poetic rhapsodies upon the beauty of love and charity, of rivulets and skies, that the stern heart of man can be controlled. Leviathan is not so tamed. Man, exposed to temptations which rive his soul, trembling upon the brink of fearful calamities, and glowing with irrepressible desires, can only be allured and overawed when the voice of love and mercy, blends with Sinai's thunders. "There was frequently," says the Duchess of Abrantes, "so much truth in the moral virtues which this new sect inculcated, that if the Evangelists had not said the same things much better, eighteen hundred years before them, one might have been tempted to embrace their opinions."