Rousseau offers an invaluable focusing to us on the theses established in the Speech on the origin of the inequality and developed in the Emile. At the same time as he protests of the sincerity of his Christian feelings, he clarifies his refusal of the original sin: “The original sin explains all except its principle, and it is this principle which it is a question of explaining”.

Rousseau clarifies moreover the principles of its comparison of the religions, and he insists on the conformity of Protestantism to the natural religion.

Especially, it dissipates ambiguities which weighed on its anthropology - it wanted to show that the man of nature was not corrupted right from the start, but it never claimed to give it in model: since “the conscience does not develop and acts only with the lights of the man”, it “is thus null in the man who did not compare, and who did not see his reports. In this state the man knows only him (...); limited with the only physical instinct, it is null, it is stupid”.

Rousseau describes in the Emile the achievement of the man according to nature, but it never prescribed a return to the state of nature.