the counsel of the apostles, that admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes....  And for their faith, it is internal and invisible:  they have the licence that Naaman had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do, they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we have already seen.  Such consequences, however, stated in these bold terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic, Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous.  He failed to see the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient type.  He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism slightly tinged with Christianity.

Then he practically accepted Hobbes’s audacious bidding to the man who should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to martyrdom, and leave the land in peace.  For the modern principle, which was contained in D’Argenson’s saying previously quoted, that the civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or subordinate.  Every test is sure to insist on mental independence ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most intent to begin.

Let us now shortly confront Rousseau’s ideas with some of the propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy of government, that have for their key-note the conception of expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the observed and recorded experience of mankind.  According to this method, the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body.  The true ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man’s spontaneous search after convenience.  The statement that while the constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances