Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration.  A body of burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that the laws had been broken in his case.  The Council in return availed itself of an equally legal right, its droit negatif, and declined to entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.  Unfortunately for Rousseau’s comfort, the ferment which his new vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation and burning of his manifesto.  For the parliament of Paris ordered the Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the same faggot served for that and for Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan. 22).  An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopaedists and their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the intolerant pride of the great churches.

Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes than this.  A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest calumnies.  Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it was by a Genevese pastor whom he named.  This landed him in fresh mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of Neuchatel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments which were so precious to their religious imagination.  They began to press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he had hitherto been on excellent terms.  The pastor, though he had been liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged.  He warned Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion.  The philosopher insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by the consistory.  The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the faith.  Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges.  The eve of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences.