It was Rousseau, and not the feeble controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion, and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans.  He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes.  This immense achievement accomplished,—­the great framework of a faith in God and immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery.  How far all this was good or bad for the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better opportunity of considering presently.

We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.

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Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau’s gift of the second Discourse with his usual shrewd pleasantry:  “I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it.  Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid.  One longs in reading your book to walk on all fours.  But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.  Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.  So I content myself with being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near your native place, where you ought to be too.”  After an extremely inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he concludes:—­“I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing