It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars; [582] and Pascal's writings only deepened the trouble. Even Bossuet, in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), did but throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion; and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church would be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since they had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than argument, kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack of courage to put all religion aside. When "variation" was put as a sign of error by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in bitter strifes with sections of his own Church, critical people were hardly likely to be confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of writing his book against the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in an acrid controversy with Fénelon, his fellow prelate and fellow demonstrator of the existence and attributes of God, accusing him of holding unchristian positions; and both prelates were always fighting their fellow-churchmen the Jansenists. If the variations of Protestants helped Catholicism, those of Catholics must have helped unbelief. 7. A similar fatality attended the labours of the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with Boyle's Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical skepticism, [583] always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy. [584] Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza, whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he makes singularly feeble answers. [585] They are too worthless to have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to seek a more plausible rebuttal. [586] A distinguished English critic, noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took up philosophy "not as an end, but as a means--not for its own sake,