children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.

'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouve la Loi.
Il faut ceder enfin! o porte, il faut admettre
L'hote; coeur fremissant, il faut subir le maitre,
Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-meme que moi.'

The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.
He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore he
declared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundation
for these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminous
convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not,
even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the
_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not
her own.

This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in
intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial
contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms,
as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems to
surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink
back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Masson
has certainly observed it well.

'Le premier _Discours_ anathematise les sciences et les arts, et ne
voit le salut que dans les academies; le _Discours sur l'Inegalite_
parait detruire tout autorite, et recommande pourtant "l'obeissance
scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
_Nouvelle Heloise_ preche d'abord l'emancipation sentimentale, et
proclame la suprematie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit a
exalter la fidelite conjugale, a consolider les grands devoirs
familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la meme
surprise.'

To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tiedes,' he wrote
to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
heaven was within men.

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