ld have
been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the
acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a
state.[160]

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political
rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest
against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the
quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the
popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a
height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification
of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the
authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had
been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,
and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular
side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had
condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the
oligarchs who condemned it.

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved
in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were
engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his
ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to
fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.
But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of
the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is
wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about
him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has
measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the
elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his
fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.
The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long
persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all
due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship