In the depths of my heart I find the rules for my conduct engraved by nature in ineffaceable characters.  Everything is good that I feel to be so.  The conscience is the most enlightened of all philosophers, and as safe a guide for the soul as instinct for the body.  The infallibility of its judgment is evidenced by the agreement of different peoples; amid the surprising differences of manners you will everywhere find the same ideas of justice, the same notions of good and evil.  Show me a land where it is a crime to keep one’s word, to be merciful, benevolent, magnanimous, where the upright man is despised and the faithless honored!  Conscience enjoins the limitation of our desires to the degree to which we are capable of satisfying them, but not their complete suppression—­all passions are good when we control them, all evil when they control us.

In the second part of the “Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard” Rousseau turns from his attacks on sensationalism, materialism, atheism, and the morality of interest, to the criticism of revelation.  Why, in addition to natural religion, with its three fundamental doctrines, God, freedom, and immortality, should other special doctrines be necessary, which rather confuse than clear up our ideas of the Great Being, which exact from us the acceptance of absurdities, and make men proud, intolerant, and cruel—­whereas God requires from us no other service than that of the heart?  Every religion is good in which men serve God in a befitting manner.  If God had prescribed one single religion for us, he would have provided it with infallible marks of its unique authenticity.  The authority of the fathers and the priesthood is not decisive, for every religion claims to be revealed and alone true; the Mohammedan has the same right as the Christian to adhere to the religion of his fathers.  Since all revelation comes down to us by human tradition, reason alone can be the judge of its divinity.  The careful examination of the documents, which are written in ancient languages, would require an amount of learning which could not possibly be a condition of salvation and acceptance with God.  Miracles and prophecy are not conclusive, for how are we to distinguish the true among them from the false?  If we turn from the external to the internal criteria of the doctrines themselves, even here no decision can be reached between the reasons pro and con (the author puts the former into the mouth of a believer, and the latter into that of a rationalist); even if the former outweighed the latter, the difficulty would still remain of reconciling it with God’s goodness and justice that the gospel has not reached so many of mankind, and of explaining how those to whom the divinity of Christ is now proclaimed can convince themselves of it, while his contemporaries misjudged and crucified him.  In my opinion, I am incapable of fathoming the truth of the Christian religion and its value to those who confess it.