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