deed, have material things to do with the purification and
the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
_mystique_ as Peguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
saying, that the things which are Caesar's shall be rendered unto Caesar.

In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have
been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for the
nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' When the
Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of
religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est
pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was
to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work
which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its
source. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other
word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt
towards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak of
God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language
shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whom
neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was
truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respect
he owed to God, said