ves 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.

DIALOGUE XXV.

ARCHIBALD, EARL OF DOUGLAS, DUKE OF TOURAINE--JOHN, DUKE OF ARGYLE AND
GREENWICH, FIELD-MARSHAL OF HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S FORCES.

_Argyle_.--Yes, noble Douglas, it grieves me that you and your son,
together with the brave Earl of Buchan, should have employed so much
valour and have thrown away your lives in fighting the battles of that
State which, from its situation and interests, is the perpetual and most
dangerous enemy to Great Britain. A British nobleman serving France
appears to me as unfortunate and as much out of his proper sphere as a
Grecian commander engaged in the service of Persia would have appeared to
Aristides or Agesilaus.

_Douglas_.