were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
allies of the one even when destroying the other.
Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
number, like Voltaire or Helvétius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in
identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]
The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not
only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the
writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the
author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th
of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in
my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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