The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been reared.  The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm; he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal.  The thought of the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he never forgot that he was sprung.  But no Catholic could enjoy the rights of citizenship.  So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs, because people interposed with explanations of what they could not understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen’s duty to admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed.  “The society of the Encyclopaedists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my natural aversion for partisanship and controversy.  The reading of the Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to understand him.  In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems and devices of superlative conviction.  In short, he submitted himself faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]

This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found again.  He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism.  It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the