This, which I condense with reluctance, was the affirmation which the Religion of Humanity needed in England. But when he came to sit in the French Convention a new burden rolled upon him. There was Marat with the Bible always before him, picking out texts that justified his murders; there were Robespierre and Couthon invoking the God of Nature to sanction just such massacres as Marat found in his Bible; and there were crude "atheists" consecrating the ferocities of nature more dangerously than if they had named them Siva, Typhon, or Satan. Paine had published the rights of man for men; but here human hearts and minds had been buried under the superstitions of ages. The great mischief had ensued, to use his own words, "by the possession of power before they understood principles: they earned liberty in words but not in fact" Exhumed suddenly, as if from some Nineveh, resuscitated into semi-conscious strength, they remembered only the methods of the allied inquisitors and tyrants they were overthrowing; they knew no justice but vengeance; and when on crumbled idols they raised forms called "Nature" and "Reason," old idols gained life in the new forms. These were the gods which had but too literally created, by the slow evolutionary force of human sacrifices, the new revolutionary priesthood. Their massacres could not be questioned by those who acknowledged the divine hand in the slaughter of Canaanites.* * On August 10, 1793, there was a sort of communion of the Convention around the statue of Nature, whose breasts were fountains of water. Hérault de Séchelles, at that time president, addressed the statue: "Sovereign of the savage and of the enlightened nations, O Nature, this great people, gathered at the first beam of day before thee, is free! It is in thy bosom, it is in thy sacred sources, that it has recovered its rights, that it has regenerated itself after traversing so many ages of error and servitude: it must return to the simplicity of thy ways to rediscover liberty and equality. O Nature! receive the expression of the eternal attachment of the French people for thy laws; and may the teeming waters gushing from thy breasts, may this pure beverage which refreshed the first human beings, consecrate in this Cup of Fraternity and Equality the vows that France makes thee this day,--the most beautiful that the sun has illumined since it was suspended in the immensity of space." The cup passed around from lip to lip, amid fervent ejaculations. Next year Nature's breasts issued Hérault's blood.