philosophers: it came from the cruel bigotry of the Jesuits, who guided Louis XIV. in his tyrannical persecution of the Huguenots. The scepticism of Rousseau was the child of Calvin's austere and bitter theology; and, in the sight of the Master, we think that Rousseau's warm-hearted and loving scepticism was preferable to that ferocious, though honest, Christianity. If the one had more of truth, the other had more of love.

The misery of Rousseau's life came partly from himself. He violated great and sacred laws, which cannot be broken with impunity. He wasted the precious hours of his youth in weak enjoyment of the leisure provided for him by Madame Warens, -without any healthy labor or any manly aim. He left her, not from conscience, but from irritated vanity and self-love. He took to his home another woman, no way suited to him, and lived as a husband with her, not really loving her, but making her half companion, half housekeeper, for long years. The same weak self-indulgence led him to renounce the charge of his children. All through life, he followed feeling and sentiment, rather than any intelligent law of duty. His ideas were noble; his practices were inferior and commonplace. As a man of thought, he has done a great work in the world, by leading the way toward something higher; as a man of action, he has served the world as a warning to be shunned. His teaching is like the pure and heavenly light of the stars, pointing mariners on their way; his conduct, the lighthouse set among roaring breakers and over perilous rocks, showing them what they ought to shun.

But let us have pity for him, remembering his long sorrows, and bitter sufferings. Worn with severe and chronic disease during the most of his life; undoubtedly insane in his later years; never understood; having no real friends; a forlorn wanderer, an exile, a banished man, the object of alternate enthusiasm and abuse; having known no mother's love nor father's care in childhood, no wise counsel in youth; thrown on his own resources for support all his life long; never meeting a single noble-hearted and wise friend or adviser; having never the happiness of real domestic joy; tormented with

jealous suspicions; longing for love, and never finding it, there never has wandered on this earth a more unhappy man, or one who deserved more truly to be called the apostle of affliction.

M. Villemain-one of the greatest and best of French critics, worthy compeer of Guizot and Cousin, of whose lectures on the eighteenth century we have made copious use in this article thus concludes his remarks on Jean Jacques:

"When I speak of Rousseau, and mingle with my sincere criticisms the admiration which it is impossible to refuse him, I am publicly reproached with having made an apotheosis of that vile,' that 'infamous' Rousseau. I stop speaking about him, and shall grow tiresome, since that is more orthodox. And yet, gentlemen, you know with what conscience I have said both the good and the evil; how I have dwelt long on the errors, which often obscured in Rousseau the brilliancy of his strong imagination, and the soul which rose naturally toward noble objects. I have explained his errors, but not justified them, out of the history of his time. Well, this, it seems, is not enough. But it is not my fault if his words, descending like a sword or like fire, have agitated the souls of his contemporaries. I do not belong to that age. I am not M. Malesherbes, the Minister of State, who, in his enthusiasm, privately corrected the proofs of the Emile.' I am not the Duke of Luxembourg or the Prince of Conti. I did not, in opposition to the prejudices of my rank and the scruples of my faith, welcome, as they did, to my castle, Jean Jacques, democratic philosopher and free-thinker. It is after sixty years have passed, that, led by curiosity, in the course of study, opening a book whose pages are still glowing with an eloquence which shall never pass away, I merely give you an account of the impressions of enthusiasm, of astonishment, of doubt, of blame, which this book occasions within me. These I communicate without art; judge them for yourselves: I neither impose on you my admiration, nor forbid you to I have only told you the truth,—it is the truth which they

censure.

accuse."

He loved much; perhaps he has been forgiven much. He suffered much; perhaps his faults have been enough punished. His faults were those of éclat; those which it is easy for all men to condemn. Dr. Johnson, denouncing pensioners

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in his Dictionary as those who sold themselves for a bribe to betray their country, and then accepting a pension himself from a Whig king, poured contempt on Rousseau, who preferred copying music to taking a pension from the King of Prussia. Rousseau had an upright soul, and a truthloving soul: he was faithful to his light; or, if led astray, openly confessed and bewailed his sin. We forgive David his murder, because he repented. We forgive Peter his repeated lies, because he repented. Shall we not forgive Rousseau his chief sin, of abandoning his children, when he bitterly bewailed it ever after, and made such a splendid expiation in his "Emile," devoted to saving little children from the suf ferings and cruelty they endured in his time? .

We cannot better close this study of Rousseau's life than with the words of-Thomas Carlyle:

"Hovering in the distance, with woe-struck, minatory air, sternbeckoning, comes Rousseau. Poor Jean Jacques! Alternately deified, and cast to the dogs; a deep-minded, high-minded, even noble, yet wofully misarranged mortal, with all misformations of Nature. intensated to the verge of madness by unfavorable fortune. A lonely man; his life a long soliloquy! The wandering Tiresias of the time, -in whom, however, did lie prophetic meaning, such as none of the others offer. Whereby, indeed, it might partly be that the world went to such extremes about him: that, long after his departure, we have seen one whole nation worship him; and a Burke, in the name of another, class him with the offscourings of the earth. His true character, with its lofty aspirings and poor performings; and how the spirit of the man worked so wildly, with celestial fire in a thick, dark element of chaos, and shot forth ethereal radiance, all-piercing lightning, yet could not illuminate, was quenched and did not conquer this, with what lies in it, may now be pretty accurately appreciated. Let his history teach all whom it concerns, to harden themselves against the ills which Mother Nature will try them with;' to seek within their own soul what the world must for ever deny them; and say composedly to the Prince of the Power of this lower Earth and Air, 'Go thou thy way: I go mine.'"

1. Apollonius of Tyana, the Pagan Christ of the Third Century. An Essay, by ALBERT RÉVILLE, Doctor in Theology, and Pastor Authorized Transla

of the Walloon Church in Rotterdam.

tion. London: J. C. Hotten, 1866.

2. Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, oder das Verhältniss des Pythagoreismus zum Christenthum. Ein Beitrag zur Religions

geschichte der ersten Jahrhunderte nach Christus. Von D. FERD. CHRIST. BAUR. Tübingen, 1832.

3. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, translated from the Greek of Philostratus. With Notes and Illustrations. By the Rev. EDWARD BERWICK, Vicar of Leixlip, in Ireland. London, 1809.

4. An Account of the Life of Apollonius Tyaneus. By M. LE NAIN DE TILLEMONT. Translated out of French. To which are added some Observations upon Apollonius. London: Printed for S. Smith and B. Walford, at the Prince's Arms in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1702.

THERE are sentences in the New Testament that sound very exclusive. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." "There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Why, it is asked, should the disciple of Jesus thus claim for his Master a solitary dignity? It is asserted, as if it were an axiom which none could think of denying, that all inspiration is of the same kind. Moses was inspired, and so was Homer; Jesus was sent of God, and so was Confucius. Why, then, arrogate for the Teacher of Nazareth an exclusive supremacy, instead of regarding him, with courtesy yet with freedom, as "the first among equals"?

So thought educated men, two hundred years after Christ, when persecution had for a time been abandoned, partly from weariness and disgust, partly because of its utter want of success, and partly because the holy character of the Saviour and the excellence of his precepts had made their impression even upon those who sat in the high places of the earth. So

thought the good young Emperor Alexander Severus; and, collecting the statues of those who had benefited mankind, he placed Abraham and Jesus side by side with Orpheus and Apollonius of Tyana.

Alexander was the last sovereign of a dynasty which ruled the Roman world between the years 193 and 235. It was, as dynasties in general are, founded by a warrior. When Didius had bought the sovereignty from the soldiers who had murdered Pertinax, Septimius Severus marched on Rome, put to death the murderers and their trafficking emperor, overthrew some rivals of a more manly description, and gave to the distracted empire eighteen years of comparative repose and splendor, before he left his power to his unworthy

son.

Severus found the old persecuting edicts still existing; and the first years of his reign were darkened by their enforcement. At length he modified them so far as to prohibit only future conversions to Christianity. Yet, even as thus softened, the law was cruel; and "the blood of the martyrs" continued to be "the seed of the Church." Among the suf ferers at that time, the martyrologists record the heroic steadfastness of Perpetua and Felicitas, of whom the one could resist the agonized entreaties of her heathen father, and the other could leave her new-born child, and go rejoicing to her death. As at their martyrdom the very jailor became a convert, it is probable that the wisest counsellors of the emperor concluded that this was not the way to stop the progress of Christianity.

His best counsellor appears to have been his wife, Julia Domna, the daughter of a priest of the Sun, at Emesa in Coelesyria. Not less interested, probably, than others to oppose the progress of the new religion, Julia, a woman of commanding mind and literary culture, forsook the path of persecution, and endeavored to attain her object by rendering paganism more attractive. She gathered around her philosophers and men of letters. Known as the imperial patroness of learning, she received probably, from those who courted her favor, many a curious manuscript which had long been