soul. These affections
mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
IV. 49, 50.

[331] Author's Preface, x.

[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.

[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.

[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.

[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. Sec. 5, p. 279. Sec. 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
concerning the female sex).

[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._)
that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist
as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's
comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the
first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).

CHAPTER V.

THE SAVOYARD VICAR.

The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
confined to the least informed portions of a community. The
Encyclopaedists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth an