parish; was closely
catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally
restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]

This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense
of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau
himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those
honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had
marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist,
and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant
than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men
as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all
the several communities of men as members of that great organisation
which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have
gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that
monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would
never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an
organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left
the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his
fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great
vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately
disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political
freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that
energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and
essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark
how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary
schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped
away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of
his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective
organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France,
and in no cou