ilius. With what
eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
lasting happiness.[19]

Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you
would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own
province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with
unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
philosophy.[21]

Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
that the word of God is expr