M. Levalois, who
is an avowed skeptic, looks upon a very different scene from that which
once so delighted Rousseau. Coming from the source they do, his words
are a valuable testimony to the religious growth of the mother-city of
French Protestantism. "I now come," says this traveler, "to the
essential characteristics of Geneva. Before being literary and liberal,
the Genevan is Christian. In Geneva the free-thinking stranger is
_advised_ of Christianity. In the souls of men, instead of meeting with
no resistance, no solidity,--as, for instance, among the greater part of
our Parisian Catholics,--instead of finding himself in the face of a
creed mechanically repeated, of a memory and not of a conscience,--you
feel yourself in contact with an individual who will believe, who can
believe, who is in full possession of the _why_ of his belief. Nothing
in the world is to me so sacred as sincerity in intelligent faith. Just
as I despise certain time-serving Catholics, who are converted because
they dread socialism, or because they dread the Empire, so much do I
respect the man who freely attaches himself to the Gospel, devotes
himself to Christ, and prays to Him.
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