, so that I could cite you before an
equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my
book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared
guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the
wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the
necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the
gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know
what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing
more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]

The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this
is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his
opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should
have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in
defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as
direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical
literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the
Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument
that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard
Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice
of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the
questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than
those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men
between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these
events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things
that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and
they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and
Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In
such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why
is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God
should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?
Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and
nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fac