ent be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when
the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws
of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that
admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their
faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman
had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,
they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their
lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and
definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we
have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold
terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not
assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see
the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian
commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a
commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
which he took for his model, of their national and official
polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism
slightly tinged with Christianity.

Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,
which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the
civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore
spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the
theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working
and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or
less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or
subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence
ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most
intent to begin.

Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the
propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy
of government, that have for their key-note the conception of
expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the
observed and recorded experience o