Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I
give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to
make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other
sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs
which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order
and purely supernatural."[132]

Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris
was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers
at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they
would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in
peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch
over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high
favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I
should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel
would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would
not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the
trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,
an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if
some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.
Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment
me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at
me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their
sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call
to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]

He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.
It was at Neuchatel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment
of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The
peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick
promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves
a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,
enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau ca