WHAT ROUSSEAU WROTE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, March 10, 1885.

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 10. Whole No. 1605.

WHAT ROUSSEAU WROTE.

Rousseau was one of the leaders of infidelity in France, yet constrained by his convictions to write as follows:—

“I confess that the majesty of the Scriptures astonishes me; the sanctity of the gospel speaks to my heart. See the books of philosophers with all their pomp; how small are they compared with this! Can it be that a book at once so sublime and so simple should be the work of men? Can it be that He whose history it gives should be only a man himself? Is there here the tone of an enthusiast, of an ambitious sectary? What mildness, what purity in his manners! What touching grace in his instructions! What elevation in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses! What presence of mind, what finesse, and yet what justice in his answers! What empire over his passions! Where is the man, where is the sage, who knows how to act, to suffer and to die, without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato painted his ideal just man, covered with all the opprobrium of crime while worthy of all the rewards of virtue, he drew trait for trait the picture of Jesus Christ: the resemblance is so striking that all the Fathers perceived it, and it is impossible to mistake it. What prejudice, what blindness, to dare to compare the son of Sophroniscus with the Son of Mary! What a distance from the one to the other! Socrates, dying without pain, without ignominy, sustains easily his character to the end; and if this calm death had not honored his life, one might have doubted whether Socrates with all his genius was more than a sophist. He discovered, they tell us, the principles of morality; but others before him had put them into practice, and he turned their examples into lessons. Aristides had been just before Socrates had set forth the nature of justice; Leonidas had died for his country before Socrates had made it a duty to love one’s country. Sparta was sober before Socrates praised sobriety; before he defined virtue, Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where did Jesus find among his people that pure and elevated morality of which he gave at once the lessons and the example? From the bosom of the most furious fanaticism was heard the highest wisdom, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues honored the vilest of all peoples. The death of Socrates, philosophizing tranquilly with his friends, is the mildest that one could desire; that of Jesus expiring in torments, injured, railed at, cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible that one could dread. Socrates, taking the poisoned cup, thanks him who presents it and who weeps; Jesus, in the midst of frightful sufferings, prays for his enraged murderers. Truly, if the life and the death of Socrates were those of a philosopher, the life and death of Jesus Christ were those of a God.”