After that preliminary passage of arms, comes the capital argument in the book. Conscience in each individual is the sovereign judge whom he is bound to obey. Since invincible causes often prevent us from discovering truth, all that God asks of us is sincerity. If a pagan is guilty before Heaven, it is not because he is an idolater, but for crimes committed against the dictates of his conscience. The greatest crime is to disobey one's conscience, to be insincere. A heretic of good faith is entitled from a human point of view to the same respect as a sincere believer. Persecution being contrary to the order of things established by God, is not only criminal but absurd.[256]
A reply to the Commentary was dashed off by Jurieu, who always wrote at white-heat.[257] When there is, as often happens, a conflict between the revealed law of God and the dictates of the individual conscience, if our conscience is the sovereign judge, God's word is in vain. Justice, equity depending on individual caprice, the responsibility of the criminal logically disappears. A murderer like Ravaillac, who, in stabbing Henri IV., obeys his conscience, must not in strict justice be put to death. No happier state there is, according to the Commentary, than that of a cannibal innocent, because his conscience is not enlightened, and free to follow the lowest instincts of man's nature. Erring conscience to Jurieu's mind has the power, not the right, to command; the fountain-head of right is justice and truth, not their counterfeit.
In a supplement to the Commentary, published in 1687, Bayle met Jurieu's attack. On the question of toleration no distinction can be drawn between orthodoxy and heresy. Suppose that, in obedience to Christ's command to give alms, a man relieves a fellow-creature feigning to be poor, he has none the less obeyed the command; therefore a heretic compelling an orthodox to renounce his belief obeys Christ's command "compel them to come in." The Protestant has the same right as the Catholic to persecute, the Pagan as the Christian, and the whole argument of the upholders of intolerance rests on worthless distinctions.
This objection Jurieu had foreseen by expounding a bold uncompromising theory. The right to persecute is a right granted by God to the Christian magistrate. No Church of Christ can hold its own in the struggle going on in this world against darkness and sin without the use of force. Early Christianity would never have won ascendancy without the help of the Christian Emperors who destroyed the Pagan temples and forbade the worship of the false deities. "It is God's will that the Kings of the world should despoil the Beast and smite down its image." The King of France has no right to persecute the Huguenots, they being Christians "confessing God and Jesus Christ according to the three Creeds." Bossuet had already flung into his adversary's face the fate of Servetus. Servetus, Jurieu readily answered, was no Christian: professing "damnable errors," he was justly burned at the stake.
A complete account of the battle that raged round these two treatises it is unnecessary to give here.[258] The drift of the argument is sometimes hard to follow, as civil toleration and ecclesiastical toleration are constantly confounded. The discussion must have unsettled the convictions of the refugees. One of the best instances of the difficulties which beset a sincere believer when examining the question, is a treatise written by a minister at Utrecht, Elie Saurin,[259] who endeavoured to steer a middle course between Jurieu and Bayle. The magistrate, he urged, has received a commission from God to procure eternal happiness to his people and promote the interests of religion. But the religion thus promoted must be the true religion and none but legitimate means employed to further it. Some of these he proceeds to enumerate: the true Church is more or less a State Church, the magistrate assists the Church in carrying out her decisions, particularly in depriving heretical ministers. And, further, the magistrate exterminates atheism and immoral religions. But he has no right to the individual conscience. The most honest men in the world entertain errors impossible to eradicate, they may be tolerated. "The magistrate," sums up Saurin, "must do, to establish and propagate the true doctrine and extinguish error, all that he can without offering violence to the conscience, or depriving his subjects of their natural or civil rights." A hard programme to carry out![260]
An influence might be traced of these debates on the minds of the contemporary English political writers. But Bayle's Commentary had a greater influence on French thought. While its philosophical argument appealed to Frenchmen, its lack of a political basis robbed it of popularity in England. That these refugees, with their unmistakable Gallic love for general ideas irrespective of any practical application, should end in gaining regard in their own country is not to be wondered at, but it is surprising that their opinions became popular in France only after Voltaire's visit to England. A few conversations at the Rainbow Coffee-House revealed to him what France had given up with the Edict of Nantes. The originality stamped upon the refugees' works showed that their political teaching was not entirely due to England or Holland. In truth, they either stopped short of English liberty or overstepped the bounds that the prudent Whigs had set to the sovereignty of the people. While Bayle pretty accurately represented the yet to come French eighteenth-century gentleman, a cultured free-thinking monarchist, an enemy to the priests and a conservative Gallican, with a dangerous tendency to allow seductive reasoning to run away with his judgment, Jurieu strangely anticipated the fanatical Jacobin. Under Louis xiv. France was a country in which Bayle would have chosen to live. In 1793, in the Public Safety Committee, Jurieu might have been considered by Robespierre as a trustworthy patriot.
LOUIS XIV DESTROYS HERETICAL BOOKS
And withal, these refugees are practically unknown in France. Lacking the needed passport to fame—the graces of style—they are forgotten; and the melancholy impression one feels in unearthing in the great public libraries their dust-eaten pamphlets, is that of disturbing the dead. The men that live in French literature are the contemporary prose-writers, Bossuet, La Bruyère; but turn to England, compare the influence of those men with that of Bayle or Jurieu, or even Drelincourt. After 1688 the influence in England of French official literature sinks to nothing, while that of the refugee literature is immense. No better justification there is of the necessity of comparative literature to discover the errors of familiar assertions, and dispel common optical illusions.