nished that
philosophers who differed in their _religious opinions_ should
communicate among themselves with so much toleration.[164]

It is not, however, clear that had any one of these sects at Amsterdam
obtained predominance, which was sometimes attempted, they would have
granted to others the toleration they participated in common. The
infancy of a party is accompanied by a political weakness which disables
it from weakening others.

The catholic in this country pleads for toleration; in his own he
refuses to grant it. Here, the presbyterian, who had complained of
persecution, once fixed in the seat of power, abrogated every kind of
independence among others. When the flames consumed Servetus at Geneva,
the controversy began, whether the civil magistrate might punish
heretics, which Beza, the associate of Calvin, maintained; he triumphed
in the small predestinating city of Geneva; but the book he wrote was
fatal to the protestants a few leagues distant, among a majority of
catholics. Whenever the protestants complained of the persecutions they
suffered, the catholics, for authority and sanction, never failed to
appeal to the volume of their own Beza.

M. Necker de Saussure has recently observed on "what trivial
circumstances the change or the preservation of the established religion
in different districts of Europe has depended!" When the Reformation
penetrated into Switzerland, the government of the principality of
Neufchatel, wishing to allow liberty of conscience to all their
subjects, invited each parish to vote "for or against the adoption of
the new worship; and in all the parishes, except two, the majority of
suffrages declared in favour of the protestant communion." The
inhabitants of the small village of Cressier had also assembled; and
forming an even number, there happened to be an equality of votes for
and against the change of religion. A shepherd being absent, tending
the flocks on the hills, they summoned him to appear and decide this
important question: when, having no liking to innovation, he gave his
voice in favour of the existing form of worship; and this parish
remained catholic, and is so at this day, in the heart of the protestant
cantons.

I proceed to some facts which I have arranged for the history of
Toleration. In the Memoirs of James the Second, when that monarch
published "The Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," the catholic
reasons and liberalises like a modern philosopher: he