The first is that he makes all natural impulses generous and virtuous, and man, therefore, naturally good instead of perverse,—­thus throwing not only Christianity but experience entirely aside, and laying down maxims which, logically carried out, would make society perfect if only Nature were always consulted.  This doctrine indirectly makes all the treasures of human experience useless, and untutored impulse the guide of life.  It would break the restraints which civilization and a knowledge of life impose, and reduce man to a primitive state.  In the advocacy of this subtle falsehood, Rousseau pours contempt on all the teachings of mankind,—­on all schools and colleges, on all conventionalities and social laws, yea, on learning itself.  He always stigmatizes scholars as pedants.

Secondly, he would reduce woman to insignificance, having her rule by arts and small devices; making her the inferior of man, on whom she is dependent and to whose caprice she is bound to submit,—­a sort of toy or slave, engrossed only with domestic duties, like the woman of antiquity.  He would give new rights and liberties to man, but none to woman as man’s equal,—­thus keeping her in a dependence utterly irreconcilable with the bold freedom which he otherwise advocates.  The dangerous tendency of his writings is somewhat checked, however, by the everlasting hostility with which women of character and force of will—­such as they call “strong-minded”—­will ever pursue him.  He will be no oracle to them.

But a still more marked defect weakens “Emile” as one of the guide-books of the world, great as are its varied excellencies.  The author undermines all faith in Christianity as a revelation, or as a means of man’s communion with the Divine, for guidance, consolation, or inspiration.  Nor does he support one of his moral or religious doctrines by an appeal to the Sacred Scriptures, which have been so deep a well of moral and spiritual wisdom for so many races of men.  Practically, he is infidel and pagan, although he professes to admire some of the moral truths which he never applies to his system.  He is a pure Theist or Deist, recognizing, like the old Greeks, no religion but that of Nature, and valuing no attainments but such as are suggested by Nature and Reason, which are the gods he worships from first to last in all his writings.  The Confession of Faith by the Savoyard Vicar introduced into the fourth of the six “Books” of this work, which, having nothing to do with his main object, he unnecessarily drags in, is an artful and specious onslaught on all doctrines and facts revealed in the Bible,—­on all miracles, all prophecies, and all supernatural revelation,—­thus attacking Christianity in its most vital points, and making it of no more authority than Buddhism or Mohammedanism.  Faith is utterly extinguished.  A cold reason is all that he would leave to man,—­no consolation but what the mind can arrive at unaided, no knowledge but what can be reached by original scientific investigation.