It is characteristic of this stage of the struggle between reason and authority that (excepting the leading French thinkers in the eighteenth century) the rationalists, who attacked theology, generally feigned to acknowledge the truth of the ideas which they were assailing.  They pretended that their speculations did not affect religion; they could separate the domains of reason and of faith; they could show that Revelation was superfluous without questioning it; they could do homage to orthodoxy and lay down views with which orthodoxy was irreconcilable.  The errors which they exposed in the sphere of reason were ironically allowed to be truths in the sphere of theology.  The mediaeval principle of double truth and other shifts were resorted to, in self-protection

[135] against the tyranny of orthodoxy—­though they did not always avail; and in reading much of the rationalistic literature of this period we have to read between the lines.  Bayle is an interesting instance.

If Locke’s philosophy, by setting authority in its place and deriving all knowledge from experience, was a powerful aid to rationalism, his contemporary Bayle worked in the same direction by the investigation of history.  Driven from France (see above, p. 107), he lived at Amsterdam, where he published his Philosophical Dictionary.  He was really a freethinker, but he never dropped the disguise of orthodoxy, and this lends a particular piquancy to his work.  He takes a delight in marshalling all the objections which heretics had made to essential Christian dogmas.  He exposed without mercy the crimes and brutalities of David, and showed that this favourite of the Almighty was a person with whom one would refuse to shake hands.  There was a great outcry at this unedifying candour.  Bayle, in replying, adopted the attitude of Montaigne and Pascal, and opposed faith to reason.

The theological virtue of faith, he said, consists in believing revealed truths simply and solely on God’s authority.  If you believe in the immortality of the soul for

[136] philosophical reasons, you are orthodox, but you have no part in faith.  The merit of faith becomes greater, in proportion as the revealed truth surpasses all the powers of our mind; the more incomprehensible the truth and the more repugnant to reason, the greater is the sacrifice we make in accepting it, the deeper our submission to God.  Therefore a merciless inventory of the objections which reason has to urge against fundamental doctrines serves to exalt the merits of faith.

The Dictionary was also criticized for the justice done to the moral excellencies of persons who denied the existence of God.  Bayle replies that if he had been able to find any atheistical thinkers who lived bad lives, he would have been delighted to dwell on their vices, but he knew of none such.  As for the criminals you meet in history, whose abominable actions make you tremble, their impieties and blasphemies prove they believed in a Divinity.  This is a natural consequence of the theological doctrine that the Devil, who is incapable of atheism, is the instigator of all the sins of men.  For man’s wickedness must clearly resemble that of the Devil and must therefore be joined to a belief in God’s existence, since the Devil is not an atheist.  And is it not a proof of the infinite wisdom of God that the worst criminals