whole life of men as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the several communities of men as members of that great organisation which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection.  He would never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm.  Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau’s writing.  As illustration of this, let us remark how Rousseau’s teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like France:  so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of his system.  In other words, in no country has the power of collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count for so little.  With such force does the ancient system of temporal and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them.  The use of reason may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.

In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.  There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his opinions.  He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D’Holbach.  What sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources.  D’Alembert had three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially correct.  “Many of them,” he wrote, “have ceased to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.  Hell, one of the principal points