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Rh book answered the intended purpose, may be presumed from the request of old Montaigne to his son, a few days before his death, to translate it into French from the Spanish original. His request was accordingly complied with; and the translation is referred to by Montaigne in the first edition of his Essays, printed at Bourdeaux in 1580; but the execution of this filial duty seems to have produced on Montaigne’s own mind very different effects from what his father had anticipated.

The principal aim of Sebonde’s book, according to Montaigne, is to show that “Christians are in the wrong to make human reasoning the basis of their belief, since the object of it is only conceived by faith, and by a special inspiration of the divine grace.” To this doctrine Montaigne professes to yield an implicit assent; and, under the shelter of it, contrives to give free vent to all the extravagancies of scepticism. The essential distinction between the reason of man, and the instincts of the lower animals, is at great length, and with no inconsiderable ingenuity, disputed; the powers of the human understanding, in all inquiries, whether physical or moral, are held up to ridicule; an universal Pyrrhonism is recommended; and we are again and again reminded, that “the senses are the beginning and the end of all our knowledge.” Whoever has the patience to peruse this chapter with attention, will be surprised to find in it the rudiments of a great part of the licentious philosophy of the eighteenth century; nor can he fail to remark the address with which the author avails himself of the language afterwards adopted by Bayle, Helvetius, and Hume:—“That, to be a philosophical sceptic, is the first step towards becoming a sound believing Christian.” It is a melancholy fact in ecclesiastical history, that this insidious maxim should have been sanctioned, in our times, by some theologians of no common pretensions to orthodoxy; who, in direct contradiction to the words of Scripture, have ventured to assert, that “he who comes to God must first believe that he is .” Is it necessary to remind these grave retailers of Bayle’s sly and ironical sophistry, that every argument for Christianity, drawn from its internal evidence, tacitly recognizes the authority of human reason; and assumes, as the ultimate criteria of truth and of falsehood, of right and of wrong, certain fundamental articles of belief, discoverable by the light of Nature?