politically they were on the same side. As against Louis's political
absolutism and enforced religious uniformity, both championed religious
toleration and the freedom of the mind. Their theological liberalism was
political prudence; it was not necessarily for that reason the less
personally sincere. They had too much wisdom to meet bigotry with bigotry,
or set Protestant intolerance against Catholic absolutism. But they had too
much sympathy with the spirit of Europe to react into free thinking or to
make a frontal attack on revealed truth. They took their stand on a
fundamental Christian theism, the common religion of all good men; they
repudiated the negative enormities of Hobbes and Spinoza.

The Christian was to hold a position covered by three lines of defences.
The base line was to be the substance of Christian theism and of Christian
morals, and it was to be held by the forces of sheer reason, without aid
from scriptural revelation. The middle line was laid down by the general
sense of Scripture, and the defence of it was this. 'Scriptural doctrine is
reconcilable with the findings of sheer reason, but it goes beyond them. We
believe the Scriptures, because they are authenticated by marks of
supernatural intervention in the circumstances of their origin. We believe
them, but reason controls our interpretation of them.' There remained the
most forward and the most hazardous line: the special positions which a
Church, a sect, or an individual might found upon the scriptural
revelation. A prudent man would not hold his advance positions in the same
force or defend them with the same obstinacy as either of the lines behind
them. He could argue for them, but he could not require assent to them.

One cannot help feeling, indeed, the readiness of these writers to fall
back, not only from the front line to the middle line, but from the middle
line itself to the base line. Leibniz, for example, writes with perfect
seriousness and decency about the Christian scheme of redemption, but it