strip naked man's
true nature, to follow up the course of time and of
the circumstances that have disfigured it, and,
comparing man as men have made him with man as
nature made him, to demonstrate that the so-called
improvements (of civilisation) have been the source
of all his woes, etc. (5)

(Note 5) "Confessions," Book VIII., year 1753.

In other words, he spun a pseudo-history from his own brain. What is
stranger, he fanatically believed in this his pure invention, and,
most extraordinary of all, persuaded other people to believe in it as
fanatically. It was taken up as a religion, it inspired heroes, and
enabled a barefoot rabble to beat the finest regular armies in the
world. Even now, at a distance of a century and a half, its embers still
glow.

Of course, it is not pretended that these various systems of thought
were ARBITRARY inventions. No more were they so than the cloud palaces
that we sometimes see swiftly form in the sky and as swiftly dissolve.
The germ of Rousseau's ideas can be traced back to Fenelon and other
seventeenth-century thinkers, weary of the pomp and periwigs around
them. Rousseau himself did but fulfil the aspiration of a whole society
for something simpler, juster, more true to nature, more logical. He
gave exactly what was needed at that moment of history--what appeared
self-evident; wherefore no one so much as thought of asking for detailed
proofs. His deism, his statements concerning the "state of nature" and
the "social contract," etc., were at once recognised by the people of
his day as eternal verities. What need for discussion or investigation?

The case of Judaea is obscure; but it would seem that something
analogous must have happened there, when the continuity of national life
had been snapped by the exile. A revolutionised and most unhappy present
involved a changed attitude towards the past. Oral tradition and the
scraps of written records that had survived the shipwreck of the kingdom
fell, as it were, naturally into another order. The kaleidoscope having
been turned, the pattern changed of itself. A few gifted individuals
voiced the enthusiasm of a whole community, when they adopted literary
methods which would now, in our comparatively stable days, be branded as
fraudulent. They simply could not help themselves. The pressing need of
constructing a national polity for the present on the only basis then
possible--Yahwe worship--FORCED them into