Jacob Vernes

This chapter highlights Jean-Jacques Rousseau's letter to Jacob Vernes on June 24, 1761. Vernes had written to Rousseau to express his admiration for Julie , as well as his reservations about Wolmar, whose atheism troubled him. Vernes found it impossible to believe that an atheist could be moral and wished that he had been converted at the end of the book. In his letter, Rousseau claims that Vernes's grievances against Wolmar shows that he has not fulfilled the object of the book properly or that Vernes has not understood it very well. According to Rousseau, “this object was to bring the opposed parties closer by means of a reciprocal esteem, to teach the philosophers that one can believe in God without being a hypocrite, and the believers that one can be a nonbeliever without being a scoundrel.”