"my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind"—leaves us a little cold. ^*

It is important to remind ourselves, therefore, that cosmopolitanism and "benevolence" commended themselves, in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the fierce partisanship now blamed for two hundred years of religious warfare. Religious tolerance may have reflected a growing indifference to religion, but at least it held out the hope of peace. ^† When patriotism seemed so often to travel hand in hand with religious fanaticism, it is not surprising that philosophers preferred to think of themselves as citizens of the "cosmopolis, the world city," in the words of Diderot—"strangers nowhere in the world." Pierre Bayle's advice to the historian—to "sacrifice resentment of injuries, memories of favors received, even love of country" to the "interests of truth"—becomes intelligible against a background of bitter religious dissension, in which competing accounts of the past, each claiming to see the hand of God in historical events, served as propaganda in the struggle between Protestantism and Rome. We might object that Bayle's image of the historian as a man "without father, without mother, without genealogy" seemed to enlist history in the service more of oblivion than of remembrance, especially when it was coupled with an appeal to "forget that he belongs to any country, that he has been raised in any particular faith, that he owes his fortune to this or that person, that these are his parents or those are his friends." To forget, however, is also to forgive: at a time when the memory of former wrongs kept alive enmities that otherwise might have been

____________________

*

According to Paine, Americans were the most cosmopolitan people in the world. "In this extensive quarter of the globe, we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles and carry our friendship on a larger scale; we claim brotherhood with every European Christian and triumph in the generosity of the sentiment. It is pleasant to observe with what regular gradations we surmount local prejudice as we enlarge our acquaintance with the world."

†

Burke attacked "these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration," just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. "That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity."

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