In the beginning of the year 1794, Robespierre caused the Convention to pass a decree proclaiming the existence of a Supreme Being, and constituting feast days "to recall mankind to the consideration of the divinity and to the dignity of his being." On June 8th, he presided personally as high priest, at the first solemn feast of the new worship. The latter, however, proved even less popular as a religion than its predecessor, and served only to demonstrate how the human heart craves for the worship of God, and will not be satisfied with the human imitations of a religion whose origin is divine. [Illustration: WORSHIP OF SUPREME BEING.] In its proscriptive decrees the Convention hitherto had not included the aged and infirm priests; by a decree of Floréal 22, these also were subjected to all exactions imposed upon others. Another decree demanded the accusation of all enemies of the people, and pronounced the penalty of death, without trial or witnesses, upon simple verbal denunciations. The Terror was now in its blindest spasm of madness, and in Paris alone, during three months, more than two thousand victims laid their heads upon the block, including many constitutional priests, who had the good fortune, through the pious offices of the Abbe Emery, to retract their errors and become reconciled to God. A pall of moral darkness hung over the nation from end to end, a deep silence, full of anxiety and terror, was broken only by the shrieks of the dying and the insane laughter of the murderers. The silence and holiness of the Lord's Day was desecrated by labor and unseemly orgies; the _decadi_ was observed instead of Sunday, and peasants or others daring to work on that day, or daring to rest on Sunday, were treated as suspects and punished with all the violence of irreligious hatred. Throughout the land every symbol and remembrance of religion had vanished: the church steeples had been torn down, the bells no longer called the faithful to divine service, the cross was treated as an object of public shame. Everywhere men and women suspected of fanaticism or denounced as enemies of the Revolution were condemned to death and executed. In the city of Lyons the guillotine severed thirty heads a day; but its work proving too slow for the blood-thirst of the assassins, the victims were ranged in rows, and mowed down by storms of bullets. In this way fully one thousand seven hundred fell in a short period of a few months. [Illustration: ROBESPIERRE (1758-1794).]