Some would send the man to Bedlam, “but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with saying:  I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.  Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain:  I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to make your broth with.  That is what you would say, and what any other sensible man would say in your place.  Whence I conclude that even according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order and purely supernatural."[132]

Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his gates.  “If I had declared for atheism,” he says bitterly, “they would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in peace like the rest.  The people of the Lord would not have kept watch over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I should have been quits with all the world.  The holy women in Israel would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would not have breathed devout insults.  They would not have taken the trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.  Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]

He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant neighbours.  Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.  It was at Neuchatel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak.  The peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick promulgated his famous bull:—­“Let the parsons who make for themselves a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris, Geneva, and Berne.  It was only the king’s express permission that saved him from a fourth proscription.  The minister at Motiers was of the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau,