favorable to tyrants; true Christians are formed to be slaves, and they know it, and never trouble themselves about conspiracies and insurrections, since this transitory world has no value in their eyes.  He denied that Christians could be good soldiers,—­a falsehood rebuked for us by the wars of the Reformation, by the troops of Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus, by our American soldiers in the late Civil War.  Thus he would throw away the greatest stimulus to heroism,—­even the consciousness of duty, and devotion to great truths and interests.

I cannot follow out the political ideas of Rousseau in his various other treatises, in which he prepared the way for revolution and for the excesses of the Reign of Terror.  The truth is, Rousseau’s feelings were vastly superior to his thinking.  Whatever of good is to result from his influence will arise out of the impulse he gave toward the search for ideals that should embrace the many as well as the few in their benefits; when he himself attempted to apply this impulse to philosophic political thought, his unregulated mind went all astray.

Let us now turn to consider a moment his doctrines pertaining to education, as brought out in his greatest and most unexceptionable work, his “Emile.”

In this remarkable book everything pertaining to human life appears to be discussed.  The duties of parents, child-management, punishments, perception and the beginning of thinking; toys, games, catechisms, all passions and sentiments, religion, friendship, love, jealousy, pity; the means of happiness, the pleasures and profits of travel, the principles of virtue, of justice and liberty; language, books; the nature of man and of woman, the arts of conventional life, politeness, riches, poverty, society, marriage,—­on all these and other questions he discourses with great sagacity and good sense, and with unrivalled beauty of expression, often rising to great eloquence, never dull or uninstructive, aiming to present virtue and vice in their true colors, inspiring exalted sentiments, and presenting happiness in simple pleasures and natural life.

This treatise is both full and original.  The author supposes an imaginary pupil, named Emile, and he himself, intrusted with the care of the boy’s education, attends him from his cradle to his manhood, assists him with the necessary directions for his general improvement, and finally introduces him to an amiable and unsophisticated girl, whose love he wins by his virtues and whom he honorably marries; so that, although a treatise, the work is invested with the fascination of a novel.

In reading this book, which made so great a noise in Europe, with so much that is admirable I find but little to criticise, except three things, which mar its beauty and make it both dangerous and false, in which the unsoundness of Rousseau’s mind and character—­the strange paradoxes of his life in mixing up good with evil—­are brought out, and that so forcibly that the author was hunted and persecuted from one part of Europe to another on account of it.