He must have written during whole years, with a sombre, invincible patience, dumbly building up, in his lonely leisure, his unfaltering negation of all that the men around him held for sacred, and that he was sworn to preach--the whole to be his testament to his parishioners. In the slow, heavy style--the style of a cart horse, Voltaire called it--there is an indubitable sincerity, a smouldering passion, but no haste, no explosion. The long-drawn, formless, prolix sentences say everything that can be said on their theme; and when the long book was done it was slowly copied, and yet again copied, by the same heavy, unwearying hand. He had read few books, it seems--only the Bible, some of the Fathers, Montaigne, the "Turkish Spy," Naudé, Charron, Pliny, Tournémine on atheism, and Fénelon on the existence of God, with some history, and Moreri's Dictionary; but he had re-read them often. He does not cite Bayle; and Montaigne is evidently his chief master. But on his modest reading he had reached as absolute a conviction of the untruth of the entire Judæo-Christian religion as any freethinker ever had. Moved above all by his sense of the corruption and misrule around him, he sets out with a twofold indictment against religion and government, of which each part sustains the other, and he tells his parishioners how he had been "hundreds of times" [952] on the point of bursting out with an indignant avowal of his contempt for the rites he was compelled to administer, and the superstitions he had to inculcate. Then, in a grimly-planned order, he proceeds to demolish, section by section, the whole structure.