Bayle.—­You are very severe upon me.  But do you count it no merit, no service to mankind, to deliver them from the frauds and fetters of priestcraft, from the deliriums of fanaticism, and from the terrors and follies of superstition?  Consider how much mischief these have done to the world!  Even in the last age what massacres, what civil wars, what convulsions of government, what confusion in society, did they produce!  Nay, in that we both lived in, though much more enlightened than the former, did I not see them occasion a violent persecution in my own country?  And can you blame me for striking at the root of these evils.

Locke.—­The root of these evils, you well know, was false religion; but you struck at the true.  Heaven and hell are not more different than the system of faith I defended and that which produced the horrors of which you speak.  Why would you so fallaciously confound them together in some of your writings, that it requires much more judgment, and a more diligent attention than ordinary readers have, to separate them again, and to make the proper distinctions?  This, indeed, is the great art of the most celebrated freethinkers.  They recommend themselves to warm and ingenuous minds by lively strokes of wit, and by arguments really strong, against superstition, enthusiasm, and priestcraft; but at the same time they insidiously throw the colours of these upon the fair face of true religion, and dress her out in their garb, with a malignant intention to render her odious or despicable to those who have not penetration enough to discern the impious fraud.  Some of them may have thus deceived themselves as well as others.  Yet it is certain no book that ever was written by the most acute of these gentlemen is so repugnant to priestcraft, to spiritual tyranny, to all absurd superstitions, to all that can tend to disturb or injure society, as that Gospel they so much affect to despise.

Bayle.—­Mankind is so made that, when they have been over-heated, they cannot be brought to a proper temper again till they have been over-cooled.  My scepticism might be necessary to abate the fever and frenzy of false religion.

Locke.—­A wise prescription, indeed, to bring on a paralytical state of the mind (for such a scepticism as yours is a palsy which deprives the mind of all vigour, and deadens its natural and vital powers) in order to take off a fever which temperance and the milk of the Evangelical doctrines would probably cure.

Bayle.—­I acknowledge that those medicines have a great power.  But few doctors apply them untainted with the mixture of some harsher drugs or some unsafe and ridiculous nostrums of their own.

Locke.—­What you now say is too true.  God has given us a most excellent physic for the soul in all its diseases, but bad and interested physicians, or ignorant and conceited quacks, administer it so ill to the rest of mankind that much of the benefit of it is unhappily lost.