ideas.  The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom in superlatives of malignant unction.  Rousseau’s reply (Nov. 18, 1762) is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness.  Turning to it from the mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man, after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures.  Rousseau never showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and unmistakably than in controversy.  He had such gravity, such austere self-command, such closeness of grip.  Most of us feel pleasure in reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his theological enemies.  Reading Rousseau’s letter to De Beaumont we realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had given us.  We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while Voltaire only made sceptics.  At the very first words, the mitre, the crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes a human being.  We hear the voice of a man hailing a man.  Voltaire often sank to the level of ecclesiastics.  Rousseau raised the archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed him as an equal.  “Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you?  What common tongue can we use?  How are we to understand one another?  And what is there between me and you?” And he persevered in this distant lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity.  We feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity.  This was because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau’s ideas, all engendered of dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his character.  He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for others.  All this was actually his mind.  And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his other antagonists, on a worthy level.

Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high remonstrance.  “You accuse me of temerity,” he cried; “how have I earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and