which the Savoyard Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night.  A writer in whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau chose to link the highest forms of man’s ideal life with a fading projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days, ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to quicken.  And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.

Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?  Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting, imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.  Rousseau’s sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the diviner melodies of the soul.  Yet, once more, the heavens in which such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of tranquillity and expansion.  The thought is too vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, “if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye.”

The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own conception.  He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires as to the special relations of that order to himself.  “I penetrate all my faculties,” he said, “with the divine essence of the author of the world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts, but I do not pray to him.  What should I ask of him?  That for me he should change