_Nouvelle Héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et
proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à
exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs
familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la même
surprise.'

To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote
to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
heaven was within men.

And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
_mystique_ as Péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard