As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe, and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch the fortunate man’s eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method of the supposed divine government.  It is hard to imagine a more execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.  Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all the world’s fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed.  He relished his own prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong.  It was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.

Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine government of our world.  For him at any rate life was then warm and the day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.  It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him religious.  The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a sovereign element of comfort.  “Pope’s poem,” he says, “softens my misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair.  Pope and Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe.  You cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would:  hope for no end to them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said before, and said far more effectively.  He begins, however, originally enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the superiority of the natural over the civil state.  Moral evil is our own work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils, except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that