[20] Kaye in a note to this parable, _Fable of the Bees_, I. 238, cites as relevant, _I Cor. x. 31_; "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." Even more relevant, I believe, is _Deut. xxix. 19_, where, in the King James version, the sinner boasts: "I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst." Mandeville, as Kaye interprets him, resembles the "_Jansenistes du Salon_" who prided themselves on the fashionable rigor of their doctrine but insisted on the practical impossibility of living up to it in the absence of efficacious grace. In my interpretation, Mandeville was both intellectually and temperamentally a "libertine" patently putting on the mask of rigorism in order to be able at the same time to attack the exponents of austere theological morality from their rear while making a frontal attack on less exacting and more humanistic systems of morality. The phenomenon was not a common one, but it was not unique. Bourdaloue, the great seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher, not very long before had called attention to libertines in France who masqueraded in rigorist clothes in order to deepen the cleavages among the members of the Church: "D'ou il arrive assez souvent, par l'assemblage le plus bizarre et le plus monstrueux, qu'un homme qui ne croit pas en Dieu, se porte pour defenseur du pouvoir invincible de la grace, et devient a toute outrance le panegyriste de la plus etroite morale."[21] [21] "Pensees diverses sur la foi, et sur les vices opposes," _Oeuvres de Bourdaloue_, Paris, 1840, III. 362-363. The _Letter to Dion_ has bearing also on another phase of Mandeville's doctrine which is almost universally misinterpreted. Many scholars, including economists who should know better, regard Mandeville as a pioneer expounder of laissez-faire individualism in the economic field and as such as an anticipator of Adam Smith. Kaye accepts this interpretation without argument. The evidence provided by _The Fable of the Bees_ in support of such an interpretation is confined to these facts: Mandeville stressed the importance of self-interest, of individual desires and ambitions, as the driving force of socially useful economic activity; he held that a better allocation of labor among different occupations would result, at least in England, if left to individual determination than if regulated or guided; he rejected some types of sumptuary legislation.