[114]

The democratic was succeeded by the middle-class Republic (1795–9), and
the policy of its government was to hinder the preponderance of any one
religious group; to hold the balance among all the creeds, but with a
certain partiality against the strongest, the Catholic, which
threatened, as was thought, to destroy the others or even the Republic.
The plan was to favour the growth of new rationalistic cults, and to
undermine revealed religion by a secular system of education.
Accordingly the Church was separated from the State by the Constitution
of 1795, which affirmed the liberty of all worship and withdrew from the
Catholic clergy the salaries which the State had hitherto paid. The
elementary schools were laicized. The Declaration of Rights, the
articles of the Constitution, and republican morality were taught
instead of religion. An enthusiast declared that “the religion of
Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero would soon be the religion of the
world.”

A new rationalistic religion was introduced under the name of
Theophilanthropy. It was the “natural religion” of the philosophers and
poets of the century, of Voltaire and the English deists—not the
purified Christianity of Rousseau, but anterior and superior to
Christianity. Its doctrines, briefly formulated,

[115] were: God, immortality, fraternity, humanity; no attacks on other
religions, but respect and honour towards all; gatherings in a family,
or in a temple, to encourage one another to practise morality. Protected
by the government sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, it had a certain
success among the cultivated classes.