ew life into
them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to
root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
achievement accomplished,--the great framework of a faith in God and
immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
opportunity of considering presently.

We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the
school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as
accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those
difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile
search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.

* * * * *

Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of