ABSTRACT
This chapter examines double conversion in a different context, that from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism and back to Protestantism. Whereas in the case of Chillingworth, it prompted him to adopt a new and broader foundation of religious belief that of reason together with Scripture, in the case of Bayle, it led him if not to complete religious scepticism, at least to a certain critical distance from religious claims to certainty. Elisabeth Labrousse has shown that Bayle's attraction to Catholicism might well have been fuelled by Richelieu's tract La mthode la plus facile et la plus assure pour convertir ceux qui se sont spars de l'Eglise. Weidnerus was a sixteenth-century Italian Jewish physician who converted to Christianity, later to become a Professor of Hebrew at the University of Vienna. In the case of Rousseau, while distilling in him a kernel of religious piety, may well have strengthened his tendency to view religion as subservient to morality and politics.
