Leibniz is remembered for his philosophy; he was not a professional philosopher.  He was offered academic chairs, but he declined them.  He was a gentleman, a person of means, librarian to a reigning prince, and frequently employed in state affairs of trust and importance.  The librarian might at any moment become the political secretary, and offer his own contributions to policy.  Leibniz was for the greater part of his active life the learned and confidential servant of the House of Brunswick; when the Duke had nothing better to do with him, he set him to research into ducal history.  If Leibniz had a profession in literature, it was history rather than philosophy.  He was even more closely bound to the interests of his prince than John Locke was to those of the Prince of Orange.  The Houses of Orange and of Brunswick were on the same side in the principal contest which divided Europe, the battle between Louis xiv and his enemies.  It was a turning-point of the struggle when the Prince of Orange supplanted Louis’s Stuart friends on the English throne.  It was a continuation of the same movement, when Leibniz’s master, George I, succeeded to the same throne, and frustrated the restoration of the Stuart heir.  Locke returned to England in the wake of the Prince of Orange, and became the [9] representative thinker of the regime.  Leibniz wished to come to the English court of George I, but was unkindly ordered to attend to the duties of his librarianship.  So he remained in Hanover.  He was then an old man, and before the tide of favour had turned, he died.

Posterity has reckoned Locke and Leibniz the heads of rival sects, but politically they were on the same side.  As against Louis’s political absolutism and enforced religious uniformity, both championed religious toleration and the freedom of the mind.  Their theological liberalism was political prudence; it was not necessarily for that reason the less personally sincere.  They had too much wisdom to meet bigotry with bigotry, or set Protestant intolerance against Catholic absolutism.  But they had too much sympathy with the spirit of Europe to react into free thinking or to make a frontal attack on revealed truth.  They took their stand on a fundamental Christian theism, the common religion of all good men; they repudiated the negative enormities of Hobbes and Spinoza.

The Christian was to hold a position covered by three lines of defences.  The base line was to be the substance of Christian theism and of Christian morals, and it was to be held by the forces of sheer reason, without aid from scriptural revelation.  The middle line was laid down by the general sense of Scripture, and the defence of it was this.  ’Scriptural doctrine is reconcilable with the findings of sheer reason, but it goes beyond them.  We believe the Scriptures, because they are authenticated by marks of supernatural intervention in the circumstances of their origin.  We believe them, but reason