its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper
love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed
the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?

The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed
by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;
he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of
the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its
petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth,
its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration
for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he
never forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights
of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the
same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs,
because people interposed with explanations of what they could not
understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the
sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of
unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty to
admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The society
of the Encyclopaedists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my
natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of the
Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for
several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the
essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of
trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We
may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems
and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his