ay a kind
of gospel. It had its share in bringing about the Revolution which
renovated the entire aspect of our country. Many of the reforms so
lauded by it have since then been carried into effect, and at this day
seem every-day affairs. In the eighteenth century they were unheard-of
daring; they were mere dreams.

Long before that time the immortal satirist Rabelais, and, after him,
Michael Montaigne, had already divined the truth, had pointed out
serious defects in education, and the way to reform. No one followed
out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing. Routine went on
its way. Exercises of memory,--the science that consists of mere
words,--pedantry, barren and vain-glorious,--held fast their "bad
eminence." The child was treated as a machine, or as a man in
miniature, no account being taken of his nature or of his real needs;
without any greater solicitude about reasonable method--the hygiene of
mind--than about the hygiene of the body.

Rousseau, who had educated himself, and very badly at that, was
impressed with the dangers of the education of his day. A mother
having asked his advice, he took up the pen to write it; and, little by
little, his counsels grew into a book, a large work, a pedagogic
romance.

This romance, when it appeared in 1762, created a great noise and a
great scandal. The Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, saw in
it a dangerous, mischievous work, and gave himself the trouble of
writing a long encyclical letter in order to point out the book to the
reprobation of the faithful. This document of twenty-seven chapters is
a formal refutation of the theories advanced in "Emile."

The archbishop declares that the plan of education proposed by the
author, "far from being in accordance with Christianity, is not fitted
to form citizens, or even men." He accuses Rousseau of irreligion and
of bad faith; he denounces him to the temporal power as animated "by a
spirit of insubordination and of revolt." He sums up by solemnly
condemning the book "as containing an abominable doctrine, calculated
to overthrow natural law, and to destroy the foundations of the
Christian religion; establishing maxims contrary to Gospel morality;
having a tendency to disturb the peace of empires, to stir up subjects
to revolt against their sovereign; as containing a great number of
propositions respectively false, scandalous, full of hatred toward the
Church and its ministers, derogating from