province.  Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your honest parents.  There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social philosophy.[21]

Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire.  A correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France.  Rousseau’s letter is a masterpiece in the style of Eliphaz the Temanite.  Our brethren must surely have given some pretext for the evil treatment to which they were subjected.  One who is a Christian must learn to suffer, and every man’s conduct ought to conform to his doctrine.  Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set up by the prince.  The writer cannot venture to run any risk by interceding in favour of our brethren with the government.  “Every one has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh but useful truths.  I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so far as it depended upon me; ’tis no fault of mine if the world has not listened.  I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a vice."[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is that they are such cowards:  a man groans over a wrong, he holds his tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23] If Voltaire could not write like Fenelon, at least he could never talk like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and the spring of alert and puissant endeavour.  In an hour of oppression one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.

Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than this.  For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a correspondent for judging the rich too harshly.  “You do not bear in mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor.  We should be just towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us.  Ah, if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them, we should soon forget that such people were in the world.  One word more.  To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24] In the observance of