was replaced in
the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This,
the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so
far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied
Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and
emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution
of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle
as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the
revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most
melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.

Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not
believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for
the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after
subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold
it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant
generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected
deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they
could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed
to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity
and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict
which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors
of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is,
when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in
his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be
followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe
in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can
hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws
which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many
edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,
wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an
academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were
most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two
parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean
party of the Commune, named improperly after Hebert, but whose best
member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by
Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and
consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the