controls our interpretation of them.’  There remained the most forward and the most hazardous line:  the special positions which a Church, a sect, or an individual might found upon the scriptural revelation.  A prudent man would not hold his advance positions in the same force or defend them with the same obstinacy as either of the lines behind them.  He could argue for them, but he could not require assent to them.

One cannot help feeling, indeed, the readiness of these writers to fall back, not only from the front line to the middle line, but from the middle line itself to the base line.  Leibniz, for example, writes with perfect seriousness and decency about the Christian scheme of redemption, but it hardly looks like being for him a crucial deliverance from perdition.  It is not the intervention of Mercy, by which alone He possesses himself of [10] us:  it is one of the ways in which supreme Benevolence carries out a cosmic policy; and God’s benevolence is known by pure reason, and apart from Christian revelation.

In one politically important particular the theological attitude of Leibniz differed from that of Locke.  Both stood for toleration and for the minimizing of the differences between the sects.  This was a serious enough matter in England, but it was an even more serious matter in Germany.  For Germany was divided between Catholics and Protestants; effective toleration must embrace them both.  English toleration might indulge a harmless Catholic minority, while rejecting the Catholic regime as the embodiment of intolerance.  But this was not practical politics on the Continent; you must tolerate Catholicism on an equal footing, and come to terms with Catholic regimes.  Leibniz was not going to damn the Pope with true Protestant fervour.  It was his consistent aim to show that his theological principles were as serviceable to Catholic thinkers as to the doctors of his own church.  On some points, indeed, he found his most solid support from Catholics; in other places there are hints of a joint Catholic-Lutheran front against Calvinism.  But on the whole Leibniz’s writings suggest that the important decisions cut across all the Churches, and not between them.

Leibniz was impelled to a compromise with ‘popery’, not only by the religious divisions of Germany, but (at one stage) by the political weakness of the German Protestant States.  At the point of Louis XIV’s highest success, the Protestant princes had no hope but in Catholic Austria, and Austria was distracted by Turkish pressure in the rear.  Leibniz hoped to relieve the situation by preaching a crusade.  Could not the Christian princes sink their differences and unite against the infidel?  And could not the Christian alliance be cemented by theological agreement?  Hence Leibniz’s famous negotiation with Bossuet for a basis of Catholic-Lutheran concord.  It was plainly destined to fail; and it was bound to recoil upon its author.  How could he be a true Protestant who treated the differences with the Catholics as non-essentials?  How could he have touched pitch and taken no defilement?  Leibniz was generally admired, but he was not widely trusted.  As a mere politician, he may be judged to have over-reached himself.