y a
source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so far
from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of
his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.
Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,
spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the
pages of the good Fenelon.[52] "I fear," she writes to Saint Preux,
"that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of
your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,
you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.
We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their
very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our
weakness, and we shall be strong."[53] This was the opening of the
deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that
struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that
Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had
drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fenelon had
once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was
justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in
the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in
the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that
more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions
of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of
circumstance that touched softer fibres.

For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene
of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.
A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
against the character of Wolmar,--supposed, we may notice in passing,
to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,--a man performing so long an
experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a
surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less
difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so
unwholesome and prurient a situation. They for