Justified True Belief

(●) The Enlightenment’s most famous dissenter, who taught the modern world that people are born good and their institutions are what ruin them. + Most of the great names of the eighteenth century thought the human race was getting better. Trade was growing, science was advancing, manners were softening, and a reasonable person could expect his grandchildren to live in a kinder world than his grandfather had. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a watchmaker’s son from Geneva with almost no formal schooling, told that century it had the story backwards. Civilization was not the cure. Civilization was the disease. From that one reversal came almost everything he is remembered for: an education that leaves a child alone to learn from things rather than from books, a politics in which a people is free only when it obeys laws it has written itself, and a religion that needs no church, no priest and no Bible because the voice of God is already speaking in every honest conscience. Two hundred and fifty years later, a great deal of what ordinary people assume about children, about authority, and about sincerity in religion came from this man. Christians have a particular reason to read him closely, and it is the reason he would have given himself. The claim that human beings arrive good, and are spoiled afterward by bad arrangements, is a direct denial of what Christians call original sin: the teaching that the fault is in us before anyone teaches us anything, that we arrive already bent, and that the best arrangements ever devised will still be run by people who go wrong. Rousseau knew exactly what he was denying. When the Archbishop of Paris condemned him for it, he did not retreat. He wrote a book defending it.

(●) 1712 AD: He was born in Calvinist Geneva, and his mother was dead within nine days. + Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, a small, proud, self-governing Protestant republic of some twenty thousand people, where Calvin’s church still set the tone and every male citizen had a vote in the General Council. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, died of childbed fever nine days later. He never got over being told about it. "My birth cost my mother her life," he wrote at the start of his autobiography, "and was the first of my misfortunes." His father Isaac was a watchmaker with a temper and a taste for novels, and the two of them read together late into the night: romances first, then Plutarch’s lives of the Greeks and Romans, which gave a small boy in a shopkeeper’s house the permanent conviction that he had been born into the wrong century. When Rousseau was ten his father lost a quarrel that turned into a lawsuit and left Geneva rather than face the court, and the boy was passed to relatives and then boarded with a country pastor at Bossey. At thirteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. He hated it. The workshop taught him, he said, to lie, to loaf and to steal, and by his own account the beatings did the rest.

(●) 1728 AD: A gate shut early in his face, and rather than go back to his master he left his city and his church. + Geneva locked its gates at nightfall, and an apprentice caught outside had to sleep in a field and face his master in the morning. It had happened to Rousseau twice already. On 14 March 1728, walking back from the country with two friends, he heard the drums beat the tattoo, the roll that told the city it was shutting for the night, and he ran. He arrived to find the drawbridge already rising: a captain named Minutoli had closed his gate an hour before the usual time. Rousseau threw himself down on the slope outside the walls and swore on the spot never to go back. He was fifteen, in his sixteenth year, and the rest of his life turned on a soldier’s impatience. He wandered into Catholic Savoy, where a priest sent him to a recent convert named Madame de Warens at Annecy. He reached her on Palm Sunday and she sent him on to Turin, where in April he was received into the Roman Catholic Church at a hospice for converts, losing thereby his citizenship of Geneva. He was received, he admitted later, largely because he was hungry. The years that followed were a long apprenticeship in nothing in particular. He was a servant, a seminarian, a music copyist, a surveyor’s clerk, a private tutor, and for much of the 1730s the companion of Madame de Warens at her country house of Les Charmettes near Chambéry, reading his way without a teacher through philosophy, music and mathematics. He called those years the happiest of his life.

(●) 1749 AD: On a hot road to a prison he read a prize question in a magazine and, as he told it, became a different man: the essay he wrote in answer won the prize and made him famous. + By 1742 he had come to Paris with a scheme for writing music in numbers instead of notes, hoping to make his fortune. The Academy of Sciences was polite and unconvinced. What followed was the kind of decade nobody plans. He spent a year as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice and left after a furious quarrel. He took up with Thérèse Levasseur, a laundry maid at his hotel, who stayed with him for the rest of his life. He wrote the articles on music for Diderot’s great Encyclopédie, the alphabetical survey of everything then known that Paris was assembling volume by volume, and he made himself useful to the brilliant, sceptical circle around it. He was thirty-seven and had published nothing that mattered. Then Diderot was imprisoned at Vincennes for a book the authorities disliked, and Rousseau walked the two leagues out from Paris to visit him, some five miles on foot, through what he remembered as the worst heat of the summer of 1749, reading as he went to slow himself down. In the Mercure de France he found the question the Academy of Dijon had set for its next prize: has the progress of the sciences and the arts done more to corrupt morals or to purify them? "The moment I had read this," he wrote in the Confessions, "I seemed to behold another world, and became a different man." He arrived at the prison in a state close to delirium, and Diderot told him to enter the competition. He won. The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts appeared in print the following year and made him famous overnight for arguing the unfashionable side: that learning and refinement had not made anybody better, only more polished at hiding what they were. Looking back after twenty years of controversy, he called that walk the moment he was ruined.

(●) 1762 AD: In a single spring he published the two books that made him, Of the Social Contract and Émile, and within weeks both were burned and he was a fugitive. + The decade after the first prize was the most productive of his life, and the loneliest. It began with a homecoming of sorts. In 1754 he went back to Geneva, returned to the Calvinist church he had left as a boy of fifteen, and was restored to the citizenship he had forfeited at Turin, which is why the city could treat him eight years later as one of its own to banish. He signed himself Citizen of Geneva on the title pages of the books that followed, Émile and the Social Contract among them, and he meant it. He published the Discourse on Inequality in 1755, quarrelled with Voltaire over whether the Lisbon earthquake told against the goodness of God, broke with Diderot and the Encyclopédie circle for good over a letter opposing a public theatre in Geneva, and retreated to the countryside near Montmorency, where he wrote a novel about a doomed love affair, Julie, that became the bestselling book of the century. Then came the spring of 1762. Of the Social Contract appeared in April and Émile in May. The first was a short, cold, dangerous book about where the right to govern comes from. The second was a long, warm book about raising a boy, with a hundred pages in the middle in which a Savoyard priest explains a religion built out of conscience and the sight of the stars, with the Bible left respectfully on the shelf. The reaction was faster than anything he expected. On 9 June the Parlement of Paris, which despite the name was not a legislature at all but the chief law court of the kingdom, condemned Émile to be burned and ordered his arrest. He was on the road within hours. Later that month Geneva burned both books and banned him from the city he had spent thirty years describing as the only decent republic in Europe. Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris, issued a formal charge against the book in August. Rousseau had expected to be read. He had not expected to be hunted.

(●) 1765 AD: Stones came through his windows at Môtiers, and the flight that followed ended in a famous quarrel with David Hume. + He found shelter at Môtiers, in a Prussian-ruled corner of Switzerland, and for three years wrote his defences there: the Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, which answers the archbishop point by point, and the Letters Written from the Mountain, which answered Geneva and lost him what friends he had left there. The local pastor preached against him. On the night of 6 September 1765 his house was stoned. He fled to a small island in the lake of Bienne, was expelled from that too, and in January 1766 crossed to England at the invitation of David Hume, who had gone to considerable trouble to help him and who thought him the most singular man alive. Rousseau was settled at Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, where he walked, botanized, and began the Confessions. Within months he had convinced himself that Hume was the head of a conspiracy to disgrace him, and wrote to tell him so. The quarrel was published on both sides of the Channel and delighted everyone who disliked either man. It is the point where a modern reader has to hold two things at once. The persecution was real: two governments had burned his books and a third had driven him out. The conspiracy was not. He spent his last years certain that every stranger in the street was in on it.

(●) 1770 AD: Back in Paris he copied music for a living and finished the Confessions, the most naked autobiography anyone had written. + He returned to France in 1767 and by 1770 was living quietly in Paris, in rooms up four flights of stairs, copying music at so much a page because he refused to live on patronage or on the profits of books he believed had been stolen from him. It was work a clerk could have done, and the most celebrated writer in Europe did it by the sheet. Visitors came to look at him the way they might look at a ruin. The Confessions, written in those years and read aloud in private houses until the police discouraged it, begin with a boast that has never quite stopped being true: he means to show one human being exactly as he is, and he will begin with himself. What follows includes the theft he let a servant girl be blamed for, the sexual shame he had carried since childhood, and the thing he knew readers would never forgive. He and Thérèse had five children, and each one was carried to the Paris foundling hospital as soon as it was born. He records it, offers his reasons, and calls the memory cruel. The last works are stranger and sadder. Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques is a defence of himself against himself, written in dialogue; on 24 February 1776 he carried the manuscript to Notre-Dame meaning to lay it on the high altar and found the choir grille locked, which he took as the judgment of heaven. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, his last book and his gentlest, breaks off in mid-sentence.

(●) 1778 AD: He died at sixty-six in a country garden, and sixteen years later the Revolution carried him to the Panthéon. + In the spring of 1778 an admirer, the Marquis de Girardin, offered him a cottage on his estate at Ermenonville, north of Paris, laid out in the informal English style Rousseau’s own books had made fashionable. He walked, collected plants, and taught the Girardin children. He died there on 2 July 1778, of a sudden haemorrhage in the brain, and was buried two days later on a small island of poplars in the lake, which became a place of pilgrimage almost at once. What happened next would have astonished him. The men who made the French Revolution took him as their prophet, quoted the Social Contract in the Assembly, and on 11 October 1794 brought his remains into Paris in torchlight procession and laid them in the Panthéon, across the aisle from Voltaire, who had loathed him. A man who had spent his life insisting that he belonged to no party had become the property of one. The two volumes of the Confessions appeared after his death, in 1782 and 1789, and did something no book had quite done before. Augustine had laid a life open, but he laid it open before God and shaped it around a conversion. Rousseau made the inner life of an ordinary, difficult, self-justifying man into serious literature with no such ending in view. Every memoir since owes him something.

What He Taught

(T1) People come from the hand of God good, and everything that spoils them happens afterward. + Watch a two-year-old take a toy from another child. One adult in the room says "that is what we are all like underneath." Another says "he has never been taught to share." Rousseau is the reason the second answer sounds as reasonable as it does, and he pressed it much harder than most people who use it today. His case runs in two steps. First, in the Discourse on Inequality, he tries to imagine a human being before society: not a savage in a war of all against all, which is how Thomas Hobbes had pictured him, but a solitary animal, slow, healthy, easily fed, with two feelings and no more. One is what he calls amour de soi, self-love, the plain instinct to keep yourself alive, which is no more wicked in a man than in a deer. The other is pity, the spontaneous flinch at the sight of another creature suffering. A being with those two feelings and no others cannot be called wicked, because wickedness needs an audience. Second, the trouble starts when people settle down together and begin to compare. Out of comparison grows what he calls amour-propre, which English has no good word for: self-regard measured against other people, the need to be thought well of, to be first, to be envied. That is the root of nearly all human cruelty in his account, and it is manufactured by society rather than born with us. Vanity, not depravity, is the engine. Here is the point a Christian reader has to see clearly, because Rousseau saw it clearly. He is not saying we behave well. He is saying that when we behave badly the fault lies in what was done to us and around us, never in what we were to begin with. Scripture says the opposite: the fault is in us, and it is there before anyone teaches us anything (Psalm 51:5, Romans 5:12). Rousseau knew he was contradicting the churches on exactly this, and he said so in as many words.

(Q) "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil." + Source: Rousseau, Émile, Book I, opening sentence (Barbara Foxley translation). The first line of the book, and the seed of everything after it. In the sentences that follow he lists what man meddles with: soil forced to grow the wrong crop, a tree made to carry another tree’s fruit, a dog mutilated, a child shaped to his father’s taste like a garden hedge. Later in the same book he states the doctrine without the picture: "there is no original sin in the human heart" (Book II).

(T2) Property and comparison, not nature, made some men masters and the rest of us unhappy. + Two kinds of inequality, Rousseau says, and they should never be confused. One is natural: some people are stronger, quicker, cleverer, and there is nothing to be done about that. The other is what he calls moral or political inequality, the kind that consists in one man having a hundred servants and another having nothing, and that kind exists only because other people agree to it. Take away the agreement and it vanishes. His account of how the agreement came about is the most quoted passage he ever wrote and also the most careful. Once people began to farm and to forge metal they had to divide the land, and once the land was divided the rich discovered they had more to lose than to gain from open conflict. So the rich proposed a bargain: let us all submit to laws that protect every man’s possessions. The poor, Rousseau says, ran toward their chains believing they saw their liberty, because they had enough sense to see the advantage of law and not enough experience to see who had drafted it. Government was born, and inequality with it was made permanent. He is careful, and modern readers often miss it, not to say that we can go back. He does not recommend living in the woods, and he mocked Voltaire for pretending that he had. The state of nature is a measuring stick, not a destination: a way of asking which of our miseries are unavoidable and which we have built ourselves. What he wants is not a return to the forest but a political arrangement in which law is something a people gives itself rather than something done to it, which is the argument of his next book (T3).

(Q) "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society." + Source: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Part II, opening sentence (G. D. H. Cole translation). The sentence that opens the second half of the discourse. He goes on to imagine how much bloodshed might have been saved if someone had pulled up the stakes and warned his neighbours that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and the earth itself to nobody, and then admits, in the very next line, that by then things had gone too far for that.

(T3) A people is free only when it obeys a law it has given itself. + Think of a club whose members write their own rules. When the treasurer tells you the dues are forty pounds, nobody feels oppressed, because you helped set the figure. Now imagine a country run that way. That is the Social Contract, and it is why the book was more dangerous in 1762 than anything Voltaire wrote. The starting move is that no one has a natural right to command anyone else. Not fathers over grown sons, not the strong over the weak, and not kings by descent. Legitimate authority, if there is any at all, must therefore be something people make for themselves, and the founding bargain Rousseau proposes is a total one. Each person hands over himself and every right he has, not to a king and not to an assembly, but to the whole community at once. That sounds like the worst deal ever offered until you notice the catch in it: since everyone surrenders exactly the same thing to everyone else, there is nobody left standing outside the bargain to be anybody’s master, and what each man gets back is a share in the body he has just joined. What that body wills, once it exists, he calls the general will, and the phrase is easy to misread, because it does not mean a vote count. The general will is what a people wills when each member is asking what is good for the whole body rather than what is good for himself. A show of hands can miss it entirely. Fifty-one citizens voting their own advantage are not the general will; they are a large private interest that happens to have the numbers. Two consequences follow, and they are the reason the book has been loved and feared ever since. The happy one is his definition of freedom. Freedom is not doing as you please, which he calls the slavery of appetite, the condition of the man who cannot walk past a bottle. It is living under a rule you have laid on yourself. The frightening one is what he says about the man who will not go along. Since he has agreed to the contract, the body may compel him, and Rousseau writes that this means nothing less than that the man "will be forced to be free." He means something limited by it: the citizen is being held to a commitment he made himself, the way the club can hold a member to rules he helped write. But the sentence was there in print, and later men with armies found it useful. He closes the book with a chapter on civil religion, and Christians should read it with their eyes open. Rousseau wanted a short state creed: God exists, providence is real, the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, the social contract is sacred, and no one may be intolerant. Anyone who cannot profess it is to be banished, and anyone who professes it and then acts against it is to be put to death for lying before the law. Christianity as the Gospel teaches it he judged unfit for the job, because it points a citizen’s heart to a kingdom that is not this one.

(Q) "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." + Source: Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, chapter 1 (G. D. H. Cole translation). The most quoted opening line in political philosophy, and almost always quoted without the two sentences that follow it. Rousseau immediately asks how the change came about and answers, "I do not know." What he claims he can answer is the other question: what could ever make those chains legitimate.

(T4) A child is not a small adult, and education should follow nature instead of hurrying it. + In 1762 a well-off European boy of eight might be laced into a coat cut like his father’s, set to memorize Latin grammar he could not use, and reasoned with about his duties as though he were a small magistrate. Émile was written against all of it, and it did more than any other book of its century to change how the West raises children. The plan of the book is a single imaginary boy, Émile, brought up in the country by a tutor who mostly stands back. In the early years the tutor teaches almost nothing directly. Let the child run, fall, be cold, break the window and sleep in the draught: things themselves are the teacher, and a consequence he feels in his own body instructs him where a lecture would not. Books wait until twelve, and the first one he is given is Robinson Crusoe, because a man alone on an island has to think about what is actually useful. A trade is learned with the hands, carpentry for choice, so that he can never be reduced to begging. Only in adolescence, when pity and the passions wake, does he meet other people’s suffering, and only then religion. What Rousseau had seen, and stated better than anyone before him, is that childhood is a real condition and not a waiting room. A ten-year-old does not reason like a short adult and cannot be argued into virtue. That observation is now so ordinary that it is invisible, and it came from this book. What he put in the place of the old system carried its own cost, and the cost falls exactly where his doctrine of natural goodness does. If the child needs no correcting, only shielding, then sin is a thing the neighbours do to him. Christians who took the pedagogy gratefully, and many did, had to decline the anthropology underneath it.

(Q) "Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways." + Source: Rousseau, Émile, Book II (Barbara Foxley translation). The sentence sits inside a warning about rushing children: nature would have them children before they are men, and forcing the order produces "young doctors and old children," fruit that rots before it ripens. He adds that he would no more look for judgment in a ten-year-old than expect him to be five feet high.

(T5) Conscience is the voice of God in a person, and it needs no book, no priest and no miracle to confirm it. + Halfway through Émile the tutor stops talking and hands the floor to someone else: a poor Savoyard priest, drawn partly from two clergymen Rousseau had known, who takes a young man up a hill above the Po valley at sunrise and tells him what he believes. Those hundred pages, usually printed on their own as the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, are the most influential thing Rousseau ever wrote about God, and they are why the book was burned. The priest is no atheist. He argues, against the materialists of the Paris salons who held that matter in motion is all there is, that motion must have a first cause that is not matter, that the order of the world shows an intelligence behind it, and that a human being who can weigh two courses and choose is not a machine. God exists, the soul is immaterial, the will is free, and providence is real. Any eighteenth-century bishop could have said the same. Then comes the turn. Where do we learn right and wrong? Not from a book, says the priest, and not from a church, but from a feeling planted in every human being that approves the good and hates the wrong before any argument arrives. He calls it a divine instinct. And if conscience is enough, then revelation becomes a question rather than a necessity. The priest will not deny Scripture; he says the reasons for and against are too evenly balanced for him to decide, so he neither accepts revelation nor rejects it and keeps what Foxley translates as "an attitude of reverent doubt." He has closed all the books, he says, because one is open to every eye, the book of nature, and it is there that he learns to serve and worship its author. This is what theologians call natural religion: as much about God as unaided reason and conscience can reach on their own, without help. Set against it is revealed religion, the truths God has told us that we could never have worked out for ourselves, and the priest leaves those standing as an open question. Scripture does say that the work of the law is written on the hearts of people who never had the law, and that their consciences bear witness (Romans 2:14–15). What it never says is that this is enough to save them. Rousseau made the writing on the heart the whole of religion and left the cross as a beautiful extra.

(Q) "Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God!" + Source: Rousseau, Émile, Book IV, the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar (Barbara Foxley translation). The priest has just warned his young listener away from clever argument and back to what he actually feels. He goes on: apart from conscience he finds nothing in himself that raises him above the beasts, "nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another."

(Q) "Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God." + Source: Rousseau, Émile, Book IV, the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar (Barbara Foxley translation). The priest has been comparing two deaths: Socrates among his friends, discussing philosophy to the end, and Jesus dying in torment while praying for his executioners. He then asks whether a book so grand and so simple could be the invention of men, and says it would be harder to believe that several people conspired to invent such a story than that one man lived it. It is among the warmest tributes to Christ written by any of the great figures of the French Enlightenment, and it stands a few pages from his refusal to accept the revelation that carries it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The churches condemned him within weeks, and he answered by defending the very doctrine they had attacked. + Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva rarely agreed about anything, and in the summer of 1762 they agreed about Émile. The Parlement of Paris condemned the book on 9 June and ordered the author arrested. Geneva followed on 19 June, burning it along with the Social Contract and shutting its gates to him. The theologians took longer, as theologians do: the faculty of theology of the Sorbonne finished its censure on 20 August, nineteen errors listed one by one, and Rome put both books on the Index of prohibited books before the year was out. Then, on 28 August, Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, issued a pastoral charge against it: a work, he said, that set out to destroy the foundations of the Christian religion. Rousseau’s reply, the Letter to Christophe de Beaumont of 1763, is the frankest statement he ever made of what he actually believed, and it is worth more to a Christian reader than any summary of him. He does not plead that he had been misread. He says that the archbishop has understood him, that his fundamental principle is that man is naturally good, and that original sin is the doctrine he rejects. Miracles he treats as poor evidence for a doctrine, and the reason he gives is a circle he asks the archbishop to look at squarely: a wonder can be counterfeited, so it has to be authenticated before it can authenticate anything, and the only warrant on offer is the doctrine it was brought in to prove. Two things follow from that exchange. The first is that nobody afterward could pretend Rousseau was a Christian writer with unfortunate lapses. The second is that his opponents had to argue. The old move of citing Scripture at a man who accepted its authority was no use here, and the defence of original sin had to be made again from conscience, from history, and from the plain evidence of how people behave. That is a large part of why the doctrine received so much attention in the century that followed.

(†) Believers went on reading him anyway, because he was the best enemy the atheists had. + The Paris Rousseau fled from contained men who had gone much further than he had. The Baron d’Holbach, whose dinner table he had eaten at, held that nature is matter in motion, that the soul is a fiction and God a projection of fear. Helvétius reduced every human motive to self-interest. Against those men the Savoyard priest is a witness for the other side, and he is a formidable one: the argument from motion to a first mover, the argument from order to an intelligence, the argument from real choice to a soul that is more than machinery, all of it in prose a farmer could follow. So the strange thing happened that always happens to a writer who fights on two fronts. Preachers who thought his anthropology poisonous quoted his tribute to the Gospel from the pulpit. Apologists who rejected his account of revelation borrowed his answers to the materialists. His reply to Voltaire after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which he argued that the evil in the world comes from human arrangements and not from the hand that made it, is a defence of providence written by the man whose books both churches would burn six years later. The clearest case of the debt is Immanuel Kant. Ludwig Ernst Borowski, who knew him and wrote the first life of him, reports that the one ornament in an otherwise bare study was a portrait of Rousseau, and the story has been repeated ever since. What is certain is what Kant wrote around 1764 in the margins of his own copy of his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. There had been a time, he says, when he thought learning alone made the honour of humanity and despised the common people who know nothing. "Rousseau set me right." He had learned to honour human beings, and he reckoned himself of less use than a common labourer unless his work went to establish the rights of everyone. Nearly everything Kant went on to say about conscience and human dignity, and everything later Christian thinkers built on it, passed through that correction.

(†) He made the religion of the heart respectable, and Christian piety has been arguing with that ever since. + Before Rousseau, a European who wanted to defend Christianity to a doubter reached for evidence: fulfilled prophecy, the miracles, the reliability of the witnesses, the design of the eye. Joseph Butler had argued that way in England a generation before Émile, and William Paley would do it again a generation after. After Rousseau there was a second road, and it ran through the feelings. If God is known first in the movement of the heart at the sight of a mountain or in the sting of conscience after a mean act, then the evidence matters less, and so does the doctrine. The most visible Christian use of that road came at once. François-René de Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity, published on 14 April 1802 while France was still picking itself up from the Revolution, argues for the faith by its beauty: its cathedrals, its poetry, the tenderness of its ceremonies, the feelings it awakens. That is Rousseau’s method turned to the defence of the church he had left. It appeared within days of the law that restored Catholic worship in France, and Napoleon was glad enough to let it work as publicity for the Concordat, the settlement he had just reached with the pope. It was the literary success of the season. For a good half century afterward, French writing in defence of the faith took its cue from Chateaubriand rather than from the evidences. Christians have never settled what to make of the inheritance. On one side, a faith that is only a set of propositions is not what the New Testament describes, and the writers who insist that the heart must be moved are quoting Scripture when they say so. On the other, a religion resting on how one feels has no defence against the day one feels nothing, and it cannot say why the empty tomb would matter if it were empty. The argument between the two runs straight through the nineteenth century, and the twentieth, and it has not finished.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: original sin, the sufficiency of conscience, a creed enforced by the sword, and five children at the hospital door. + Four places where the disagreement is real and should be stated at full strength. - Natural goodness. Rousseau wrote that "there is no original sin in the human heart" (Émile, Book II), and defended the claim under direct attack in the Letter to Beaumont. Scripture puts the fault further in than any upbringing can reach: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). Jesus locates the trouble in the same place, not in what enters a person from outside but in what comes out of him (Matthew 15:19), and Paul traces it to the race’s beginning rather than to its institutions (Romans 5:12; Romans 3:23). The practical difference is enormous. If people are born good, the work is to fix the arrangements. If the fault is inside, the arrangements must be built to restrain people who will abuse them, which is why Christian political thought has always insisted on limits and checks that Rousseau’s sovereign people does not have. - Conscience as enough. That conscience is real, and God-given, Christians affirm with him: the work of the law is written on the heart, and the conscience bears witness (Romans 2:14–15). But Paul says that in the course of showing that everyone stands guilty, not that everyone can find his own way home. A compass tells you which way is north; it does not carry you there. Rousseau’s priest keeps his reverent doubt about revelation and loses with it the one thing conscience cannot supply, forgiveness that comes from outside and is received as a gift (Ephesians 2:8–9). - The civil religion. The last chapter of the Social Contract would banish the citizen who cannot profess the state creed and execute the one who professes it and then acts otherwise, and it sets aside the Gospel as useless to a republic because it turns hearts toward another kingdom. The Christians of the first three centuries were killed on exactly that charge and answered it by dying rather than burning incense, and no arrangement in which the state writes the creed and enforces it with the sword can be squared with that. - His own children. The Confessions record that he and Thérèse Levasseur had five children and that every one was left at the Paris foundling hospital, where the mortality was appalling and where a cipher on a card was the only thing that could ever have identified the first of them. He gives his reasons, and he never pretends they are good ones. It is the plainest instance of the gap between a doctrine and a life: the man who taught Europe how to raise a child, and wrote that a father who does not raise his own is guilty of a crime, sent his own away. Scripture does not soften it: "But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8). Rousseau is the hardest kind of opponent, the kind who is right about something important. He saw that the polished society of his century was cruel behind its manners, that children were being crushed into little adults, that authority which cannot say where it came from does not deserve obedience. Those are real observations, and the church has been the better for having to answer them. What he could not see was the thing he was standing on: that the man who wrote most movingly about goodness was also the man at the hospital door, and that the distance between those two facts is what the doctrine he denied was invented to explain.