consent, and invested with no divine right to their allegiance. The Church was no longer a sacred institution governed by priests who held their commission directly from God, but only a sort of spiritual police agency, an ally of the State in the restraint of vice and crime, or, at best, in Protestant countries, a society for mutual improvement. Men were “free and equal,” each standing face to face with his fellows, admitting no superiority or superstition of hero-worship in regard to any one of them. And the Deity, if his existence were not denied, tended to become a mere “Supreme Being,” who was removed to such a distance from mankind that he could hardly be reached by their reverence, still less by their love. At the same time, the influences which, in one point of view, seemed to limit and narrow human existence, in another point of view tended to liberate and enlarge it. If they excluded the idea of the infinite from man’s life, they emancipated him from many degrading superstitions, which in an earlier age had held him “all his lifetime subject to bondage.” And as the pressure from above was lightened the individual seemed to become master of himself and of his destiny. If the king could no longer say, “_L’Etat c’est moi_,” the rights of the subject were vindicated; if the authority of the Church was weakened, the bonds of free inquiry were broken; if imagination ceased to fill men with the awe and wonder of higher powers, the way was opened up for scientific and industrial development; if God was regarded as unknowable, “the proper study of mankind was man,” and that study could now be pursued without fear or hinderance. Poetry and religion might be impoverished, the sense of the binding force of social relations might be weakened, but interest in the bettering of man’s earthly condition was awakened, and with it came a new desire for justice to all, a new intolerance of human suffering, and a new demand that the lot of the class “which is most numerous and poor” should be made less wretched and insecure, and, towards the end of the century, a new turn was given to its leading thought, for an effort was made to discover in the nature of the individual himself the equivalent of those universal powers which the enlightenment had banished from the external world and from the life of society. Rousseau carried individualism to an extreme point, at which it became its own correction, and taught men to find _within_ their own souls the infinite which they could no longer discover _without_. Rejecting in the first instance all social conventions as unjust limitations of the natural man, and adopting the prevailing theory of the time, that the State is only the product of a contract between independent persons, he yet discovered in the individual thus liberated from all external pressure a “common reason,” and “a general will,” which could reorganize his life and bind him to his fellow-men and to God.