But the fact is that Robespierre's influence was used throughout in the opposite direction. He detested, it is true, the disorderly excesses that had accompanied the Terror in the departments. He wished to centralise and regulate the system, to make it uniform, moral and decorous, to take the power of the sword out of the hands of men whom he distrusted and disliked. But he did not wish to end it. The police-law of April, 1794, which directed that all conspirators should be brought to Paris for trial, and the establishment of a new Bureau of police under the supervision of St. Just and of Robespierre himself, were designed to prevent the occurrence of enormities like those of Carrier in the provinces, and to deprive Robespierre's opponents in the Committee of General Security of their monopoly in matters of police. But they were not measures of compassion. From the first, Robespierre had taken a prominent part in founding and developing the Revolutionary Tribunal. Again and again he had protested against its delays and its unnecessary forms. When he attained the climax of his power, he swept those forms away. In the Revolutionary Tribunal he had staunch adherents. His work in the Committee of Public Safety was always largely concerned with questions of police. The Terror was an essential part of his system. He honestly believed that his Utopia could not flourish until he had consumed the wicked, and against the wicked accordingly he sharpened the sword of death. With this crusade against the enemies of his ideal he mingled schemes of arbitrary benevolence. Both St. Just and Robespierre were determined to found the State which Rousseau had conceived, wherein all should be equal, virtuous, enlightened, without poverty or riches, irreverence or sin. As a step towards it they determined to establish Rousseau's Church. On the 18th Floréal (7th May), Robespierre induced the Convention to decree its belief in a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul. On the 20th Prairial (8th June), he celebrated, in one of the strangest pageants of history, the festival of the new Deity in France. Arrayed in a brilliant uniform, and carrying a bouquet of flowers and corn sheaves, Robespierre marched at the head of a procession out to the Champ de Mars, burned the symbols of Atheism and Vice, and inaugurated the new religion. 'Here,' he cried, 'is the Universe assembled. O Nature, how sublime, how exquisite, thy power! How tyrants will pale at the tidings of our feast.' And within two days of this ideal festival he set to work to re-organise the machinery of the guillotine. A few weeks before he had taken a chief part in establishing, on the demand of his adherent Maignet, an extraordinary tribunal at Orange in the South, and had drawn up with his own hand a paper of instructions, which laid it down that the conscience of the judges was to be the only test of the guilt of the accused. In the law of the 22nd Prairial this