temptation to evil.

Yet it is not in some radiance breaking through this cloudy
environment, it is not in this or that faculty overcoming all
obstacles, it is in the entirety of his nature as originally formed,
and as moulded or marred by circumstance and fate, that we shall find
the secret of that spell which he exercised over men of all classes
and characters. The culture which might have sweetened and perhaps
ennobled his life would have unfitted him for his mission. It would
have brought him more or less into harmony with his age; and it was by
his utter and vehement opposition to its habits and opinions that
he turned the stream into a different channel. Not only his finer
intuitions and purer tastes, but his unsatisfied desires, his errors,
his remorse, urged him to make war upon it, as the step-mother that
had sought to enervate or brutalize his mind while defrauding him of
his inheritance. He held up the image of its corruption, shallowness
and false refinement, and that of a life of simple manners and
unperverted instincts. That he depicted this as the real life of
a primitive epoch only gave greater pungency to the contrast.
The eighteenth century, aroused to the consciousness of its own
degeneracy, its false and artificial existence, readily accepted an
idealized Geneva, an idealized Sparta, as the type of a primitive
community, the model on which society was to be refashioned. What the
"pure word of God" had been to the Reformers, that "Nature" became to
the revolutionists in all departments of thought and action, in poetry
and music as in philosophy and politics--a shibboleth to rally and
unite all the elements of discontent and aspirations for change, a
universal test by which to try all doctrines and systems. In either
case, as was soon discovered, the test would itself admit of diverse
interpretations; but in the mean while the solvent had taken effect,
the authority of custom and tradition had been overthrown, old
organizations had crumbled into dust.

That the agitation thus evoked should have produced many grotesque,
many frightful results, cannot seem strange. Long before the lower
strata had been reached the surface was in a state of ebullition.
Polite society was delightfully thrilled with a feeling of its own
depravity, and found in the novel sensation the zest that had been
wanting to its jaded powers of enjoyment. Nor was it awakened from its
illusions by the first eruption from below. In a t