Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of the gods.  Rousseau’s deism, severing the influence of the Supreme Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from the guilt that brings misery,—­that is at the moment when conduct begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,—­did thus effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.  Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he would.  This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men, thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them.  The faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a spiritual want.  It was even more readily to be accepted by the human intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father’s excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love for their brethren whom they had seen.

The Savoyard Vicar’s own position to Christianity was one of reverential scepticism.  “The holiness of the gospel,” he said, “is an argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry to find a good answer.  Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that!  Is there here the tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary?  What gentleness, what purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what loftiness in his maxims!  Assuredly there was something more than human in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death.  If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.  Shall we say that the history of the gospels is invented at pleasure?  My friend, that is not the fashion of invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit.  What are we to do in the midst of all these contradictions?  To be ever modest and circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject nor understand, and to make one’s self lowly before the great being who alone knows the truth."[346]