come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and the laws.  These articles of belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as sentiments of sociability.  If any one declines to accept them, he ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable, incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his life to his duty.  If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas, carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before the laws.[254]

Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De Monarchia of the great poet of catholicism.  The division of two co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be “pure Hobbism.”  This, the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and emperor, of positive law and law divine.  The famous civil constitution of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau’s principle as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.

Rousseau’s memorable prescription, banishing all who should not believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau’s state.  It seemed to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors of the Holy Office.  Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws which no city ever yet received, and “fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic