Note 4 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Certainly Patin and Naudé are of less importance for freethought than La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a “Conseiller d’Estat ordinaire,” tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early members of the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting figure4 in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of Sextus Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolerance. Standing in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman’s suggestion a treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen,5 justifying toleration by pagan example—a course which raises the question whether Richelieu himself was not strongly touched by the rationalism of his age. If it be true that the great Cardinal “believed as all the world did in his time,”6 there is little more to be said; for unbelief, as we have seen, was already abundant, and even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no ecclesiastic in high power ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy;7 and from the date of his appointment as Minister to Louis XIII (1624), for forty years, there was no burning of heretics or unbelievers in France. If he was orthodox, it was very passively.8