circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But
inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without
resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink
into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But
in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee
too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to
avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life,"
to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but
simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy
was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good
use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great