Note 101 — Chapter III

Yet the lawyer who enunciated such a maxim as this has been celebrated for an unusual liberality of sentiment in religious and political matters, as well as for his learning. Dugald Stewart commends 'the liberal and moderate views of this philosophical politician,' as shown in the treatise De la République, and states that he knows of 'no political writer of the same date whose extensive, and various, and discriminating reading appears to me to have contributed more to facilitate and to guide the researches of his successors, or whose references to ancient learning have been more frequently transcribed without acknowledgment.'—Bayle considered him 'one of the ablest men that appeared in France during the sixteenth century.'—Dissertation First in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Hallam (Introduction to the Literature of Europe) occupies several of his pages in the review of Bodin's writings. Jean Bodin, however, on the authority of his friend De Thou, did not escape suspicion himself of being heretical.