Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many
subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,
because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the
spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the
kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,
are really its ministers and servants.[251]

The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays
so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another
world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure
of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the
Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we
have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of
assertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequences
ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the
definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change
of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional
statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,
constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests
them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,
at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less
trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than
any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of
the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the
debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.
It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian
monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise
no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain
degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain
philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.

Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as
of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or
rite, the true and pure thei