asps of orthodoxy. The
doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the
lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of
course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de
Beaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint
Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had
issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which
bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century
and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and
decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in
proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom
in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)
is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never
showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and
unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere
self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in
reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his
theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we
realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had
given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while
Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the
crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the
Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy
Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes
a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire
often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the
archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And
what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant
lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We
feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was
because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of
dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his