The festival in honour of the Supreme Being was an ingenuous expression of the piety of the eighteenth century. Robespierre was perfectly right in lamenting that Rousseau had not lived to see that day; it would have been a festival after his own heart. And so firmly were these religious ideas rooted in the minds of the legislators that they stood when Robespierre fell. The "citizen" religion instituted by the Convention was not of his evolving. Far from turning back after his death, men pressed eagerly onwards. The Republican calendar was introduced. As "the Christian era had been the era of lies, deception, and charlatanism." the Christian reckoning was abolished; time was reckoned from 1792, the week was superseded by the decade, and it was proposed to give to the various saints' days the names of agricultural implements and useful domestic animals.
Ere long regular liturgies and catechisms of the new religion were published. In one such book (_Office des décadis en discours, hymnes et prières en usage dans les temples de la Raison_) we read:--
"Liberty, thou supreme happiness of man upon earth, hallowed be thy name by all nations throughout the world! May thy joy-bringing kingdom come and put an end to the reign of tyrants! May thy holy worship take the place of the worship of those miserable idols whose altars thou hast overthrown!... I believe in a Supreme Being who has created men free and equal, who has formed them to love one another and not to hate one another, who desires to be honoured by the exhibition of virtue, not of fanaticism, and in whose eyes the noblest of worships is the worship of truth and reason. I believe in the approaching fall of all tyrants, in the regeneration of morality, the ever-increasing spread of all the virtues, and the eternal triumph of liberty."
Simultaneously, however, men confessed their faith in other and less innocent ways. The churches were dismantled to serve the purposes of the new religion. Practical reasons made the abolition of Sunday a vital question; ere long suspicion attached to every one who observed it--and in those days it was dangerous to be suspected. The violent attempts made during the rule of the Convention to prevent the observance of Sunday constituted a new species of tyranny, which, although more excusable than the tyranny it superseded, was no less barbarous and unreasonable.