eau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
elements of nobleness of soul.

It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great
power in the century, between the Encyclopaedic party and the Church. He
recognised a something in men, which the Encyclopaedists treated as a
chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their
own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and
morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in
France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble
controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other
ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion,
and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught
of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and,
throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all
religions have their root and their power, he breathed n