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