above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form of worship.  “It did not consist in a vain moving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of the tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes.  This act passed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve them."[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the deistical reaction in the eighteenth century.  While the truly scientific and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise dispensers of blessings, and the like.  “Ah, madam,” he once said, “sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there is no God.  But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head erect, and an inspired glance):  the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul.  I find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him.  I admire and adore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence."[81] As if that settled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively.  God became the highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and sunny gardens.  We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of this important conception when we come to Emilius, where it was launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own positive knowledge.  Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at the very birth-place of that particular Etre Supreme to whom Robespierre offered the incense of an official festival.

Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this cruel destiny should be his.  Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart inspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory because she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being unable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they had been purified into goodness.  In truth it must be confessed, says Rousseau, that alike in this world and the other