ntry has the free life of the individual been made to count
for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and
spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.

In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was
only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled
him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual
connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.
There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva
in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most
memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and
smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the
materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What
sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had
three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from
them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he
gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially
correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the
divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our
belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend
that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an
eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure
Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and
supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall
propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is
almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly
all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for
Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it
would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of
the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in