Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la meme
surprise.'
To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tiedes,' he wrote
to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
heaven was within men.
And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
so that he writes believing that all men will understand.
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