y, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to
Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.

Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
the guilt that brings misery,--that is at the moment when conduct
begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,--did thus
effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
intelligence, f