 Bayle’s Commentaire is the most comprehensive attempt to refute the arguments for the duty of intolerance that go back to Augustine (and especially his interpretation of the parable “compel them to come in,” where the master orders his servants to force those who were invited to the prepared supper but did not attend to come in; see Luke 14, 15ff.). In his elaborate argument against the use of force in matters of religion, Bayle does not primarily take recourse to the idea that religious conscience must not and cannot be forced, for he was aware of the powerful Augustinian arguments against both points (cf. Forst 2008 and Kilcullen 1988). Rather, Bayle argued that there is a “natural light” of practical reason revealing certain moral truths to every sincere person, regardless of his or her faith, even including atheists. And such principles of moral respect and of reciprocity cannot be trumped by religious truths, according to Bayle, for reasonable religious faith is aware that ultimately it is based on personal faith and trust, not on apprehensions of objective truth. This has often been seen as a skeptical argument, yet this is not what Bayle intended; what he suggested, rather, was that the truths of religion are of a different epistemological character than truths arrived at by the use of reason alone. Connecting moral and epistemological arguments in this way, Bayle was the first thinker to try to develop a universally valid argument for toleration, one that implied universal toleration of persons of different faiths as well as of those seen as lacking any faith.