Montesquieu argues that it is well to have several sects in a country, as they keep a watch on each other, and every man is anxious not to disgrace his party. But it is for toleration and not for equality that the author pleads. A state church seemed almost necessary to thought in the early part of the eighteenth century. Yet Montesquieu has no great liking for any form of dogmatic religion; in this he belongs distinctly with the Philosophers; morality is, in his eyes, the great, perhaps the only thing to be desired; obedience to law, love to men, filial piety, those, he says, are the first acts of all religions; ceremonies are good only on the supposition that God has commanded them; but about the commands of God it is easy to be mistaken, for there are two thousand religions, each of which puts in its claim. Thus was the great argument of the Catholics, that the multiplicity of Protestant sects--provided their falsity, turned against its inventors.[Footnote: Ibid., i. 164. Letter xlvi. Compare with Montesquieu's opinion, expressed in the _Spirit of the Laws_, that the sovereign should neither allow the establishment of a new form of religion, nor persecute one already established.] The licentiousness of the "Persian Letters" has been mentioned. It is one of the most noticeable features of the writings of the Philosophers of the eighteenth century that the whole subject of sexual morality is viewed by them from a standpoint different from that taken by ourselves. The thinking Frenchmen of that age believed that there was a system of natural morals, imposed on man by his own nature and the nature of things. They believed that there was also an artificial system resting only on positive law, or on the ordinances of the church. It was the tendency of the ecclesiastical mind to ignore that distinction. That tendency had been pushed too far and had produced a reaction.