, he admired the morality
and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of
adoration and submission. "The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits
the moral world, but not that other which is above," M. Joubert has said
in his _Pensees_. The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too
feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a
foregone conclusion. Against the systematic infidelity which was more
and more creeping over the eighteenth century, the Christian faith alone,
with all its forces, could fight and triumph. But the Christian faith
was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel's rigging instead of
defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the
dikes were breaking one after, another. The religious belief of the
Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in
_Emile,_ and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau
in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the soul and regulate life.

"What the eighteenth century lacked [M. Guizot, _Melanges biographiques_
(Madame la Comtesse de Rumford)], "what there was of superficiality in
its ideas and of decay in its morals, of senselessness in its pretensions
and of futility in its creative power, has been strikingly revealed to us
by experience; we have learned it to our cost. We know, we feel the evil
bequeathed to us by that memorable epoch. It preached doubt, egotism,
materialism. It laid for some time an impure and blasting hand upon
noble and beautiful phases of human life. But if the eighteenth century
had done only that, if such had been merely its chief characteristic, can
any one suppose that it would have carried in its wake so many and such
important matters, that it would have so moved the world? It was far
superior to all its sceptics, to all its cynics. What do I say?
Superior? Nay, it was essentially opposed to them and continually gave
them the lie. Despite the weakness of its morals, the frivolity of its
forms, the mere dry bones of such and such of its doctrines, despite its
critical and destructive tendency, it was an ardent and a sincere
century, a century of faith and disinterestedness. It had faith in the
truth, for it claimed the right thereof to reign in this world. It had
faith in humanity, for it recognized the right thereof to perfect itself
and would have had that right exercised without obstruction. It erred,
it