This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the several communities of men as members of that great organisation which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.