He destroys not only all faith but all authority, by a low appeal to prejudices, and by vulgar wit such as the infidels of a former age used in their heartless and flippant controversies.  I am not surprised at the hostility displayed even in France against him by both Catholics and Protestants.  When he advocated his rights of man, from which Thomas Paine and Jefferson himself drew their maxims, he appealed to the self-love of the great mass of men ground down by feudal injustices and inequalities,—­to the sense of justice, sophistically it is true, but in a way which commanded the respect of the intellect.  When he assailed Christianity in its innermost fortresses, while professing to be a Christian, he incurred the indignation of all Christians and the contempt of all infidels,—­for he added hypocrisy to scepticism, which they did not.  Diderot, D’Alembert, and others were bold unbelievers, and did not veil their hostilities under a weak disguise.  I have never read a writer who in spirit was more essentially pagan than Rousseau, or who wrote maxims more entirely antagonistic to Christianity.

Aside from these great falsities,—­the perfection of natural impulse, the inferiority of woman, and the worthlessness of Christianity,—­as inculcated in this book, “Emile” must certainly be ranked among the great classics of educational literature.  With these expurgated it confirms the admirable methods inspired by its unmethodical suggestions.  Noting the oppressiveness of the usual order of education through books and apparatus, he scorns all tradition, and cries, “Let the child learn direct from Nature!” Himself sensitive and humane, having suffered as a child from the tyranny of adults, he demands the tenderest care and sympathy for children, a patient study of their characteristics, a gentle, progressive leading of them to discover for themselves rather than a cramming of them with facts.  The first moral education should be negative,—­no preaching of virtue and truth, but shielding from vice and error.  He says:  “Take the very reverse of the current practice, and you will almost always do right.”  This spirit, indeed, is the key to his entire plan.  His ideas were those of the nineteenth, not the eighteenth century.  Free play to childish vitality; punishment the natural inconvenience consequent on wrong-doing; the incitement of the desire to learn; the training of sense-activity rather than reflection, in early years; the acquirement of the power to learn rather than the acquisition of learning,—­in short, the natural and scientifically progressive rather than the bookish and analytically literary method was the end and aim of “Emile.”

Actually, this book accomplished little in its own time, chiefly because of its attack on established religion.  Influentially, it reappeared in Pestalozzi, the first practical reformer of methods; in Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten; in Spencer, the great systematizer of the philosophy of development; and through these its spirit pervades the whole world of education at the present time.