thought of seeing before any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all possible lightness of heart.  “Seeing country is an allurement which hardly any Genevese can ever resist.  Everything that met my eye seemed the guarantee of my approaching happiness.  In the houses I imagined rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams, bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.  It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.

The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly forward.  At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow.  It is needless to enter into the circumstances of Rousseau’s conversion to Catholicism.  The mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them was ever hollower than this.  Rousseau avows that he had been brought up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost this abhorrence.  He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his present destitute condition.  “I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit.”  “The sophism which destroyed me,” he says in one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, “is that of most men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late for them to use it.  It is only through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous.  But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the hazard.  Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can