Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year 1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own, to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely a tolerated little sect. Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who had defended the rights of private property against the communistic tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving their subjects to this or that church. But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years. His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book that was officially classified under “philosophy.” CHAPTER XIX ARMINIUS The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between “organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the individual are far more important than those of the mass. If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants. Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”