solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of man.  “This contemplation,” he wrote and felt, “is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights."[349]

This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.  But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things.  Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry indifference.  It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,—­that imperial conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst.  Do you ask for sanctions!  One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling harmony of his days.

FOOTNOTES: 

[337] See Hallam’s Literature of Europe, Pt.  I. ch. ii.  Sec. 64.  Again (for the 16th century), Pt.  II. ch. ii.  Sec. 53.  See also for mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle’s Dictionary, s.v. Viret.

[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.

[339] Emile, IV. 163.

[340] IV. 183-185.

[341] M. Henri Martin’s Hist. de France, xvi. 101, where there is an interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar’s eloquence into scientific form.

[342] Emile, IV. 135.

[343] Emile, IV. 204.