thinks to be true.

_Locke_.--An enthusiast who advances doctrines prejudicial to society, or
opposes any that are useful to it, has the strength of opinion and the
heat of a disturbed imagination to plead in alleviation of his fault; but
your cool head and sound judgment can have no such excuse. I know very
well there are passages in all your works, and those not a few, where you
talk like a rigid moralist. I have also heard that your character was
irreproachably good; but when, in the most laboured parts of your
writings, you sap the surest foundations of all moral duties, what avails
it that in others, or in the conduct of your life, you have appeared to
respect them? How many who have stronger passions than you had, and are
desirous to get rid of the curb that restrains them, will lay hold of
your scepticism to set themselves loose from all obligations of virtue!
What a misfortune is it to have made such a use of such talents! It
would have been better for you and for mankind if you had been one of the
dullest of Dutch theologians, or the most credulous monk in a Portuguese
convent. The riches of the mind, like those of Fortune, may be employed
so perversely as to become a nuisance and pest instead of an ornament and
support to society.

_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 themsel