The tender mercies of the Inquisition were cruel, and could not allow so
notable a victim to escape their vengeance. Whether to burn a man is the
surest way to convert him, is a question open to argument. Vanini
disguised his insidious teaching carefully, but it required a thick veil
to deceive the eyes of Inquisitors, who were wonderfully clever in spying
out heresy, and sometimes thought they had discovered it even when it was
not there. Vanini and many other authors would have been wiser if they had
not committed their ideas to writing, and contented themselves with words
only. _Litera scripta manet_; and disguise it, twist it, explain it, as
you will, there it stands, a witness for your acquittal or your
condemnation. This thought stays the course of the most restless pen,
though the racks and fires of the Inquisition no longer threaten the
incautious scribe.
We must not omit a French philosopher who died just before the outbreak of
the First French Revolution, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It is well known that
his work _Emile, ou de l'Education, par J.J. Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve_
(_a Amsterdam_, 1762, 4 vols., in-12), obliged him to fly from France and
Switzerland, in both of which countries he was adjudged to prison. For
many years he passed a wandering, anxious life, ever imagining that his
best friends wished to betray him. Of his virtues and failings as an
author, or of the vast influence he exercised over the minds of his
countrymen, it is needless to write.
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