Many of her young friends ventured on a little gentle raillery.
Various repressive remedies were proposed, but Shaftesbury maintained that fanaticism was best encountered by "raillery" and "good-humour."
If you pressed him for an opinion he took refuge in raillery, and threw out some paradox with which it was not easy to cope.
Already antiquated, it could not resist the wit and raillery with which Voltaire, in his Lettres sur les Anglais (1728), brought against it the principles and results of Locke and Newton.
These evil tendencies in the popular presentation of Christianity undoubtedly begot in Shaftesbury's mind a certain amount of repugnance and contempt to some of the doctrines of Christianity itself; and, cultivating, almost of set purpose, his sense of the ridiculous, he was too apt to assume towards such doctrines and their teachers a tone of raillery.