even that with so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one?  And you, my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small respect and so much levity?  You call me impious, and of what impiety can you accuse me—­me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to persuade all men to love one another?  The impious are those who unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of men.  The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the honours that are due to it only.  The impious are those who arrogate to themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good will and pleasure.  The impious are those who have libels read in the church.  At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of indignation fall from my eyes.  Priests of the God of peace, you shall render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have dared to put his house....  My lord, you have publicly insulted me:  you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me.  If you were a private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the wrong was public.  But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the necessity of being just, and I am nothing.  Yet you who profess the gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know what your own duty is in such a case.  Mine I have done:  I have nothing more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]

The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone.  For this is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the controversialists of a very controversial time.  Some of his strokes in defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical literature.  We will give one specimen from the letter to the Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain.  The Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the questionableness of the supporting testimony.  To which the archbishop thus:—­“But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?  By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself known the