“Such were the lights of this great mind, who has so well understood the duties of man. I venture to say, that he would have deserved to be adored if he had only known as well human weakness; but in order to do this, he must have been God Himself. Mere man as he was, after having so well explained human duty, he loses himself in the presumption of human capacity. He avers that God has given to every man the means of acquitting himself of all his obligations; that such means are always within his own power, that happiness is to be sought by things within our reach, since God has given us them for this very end. He points out in what our freedom consists: goods, life, esteem are not in our power, and therefore do not lead to God; but none can force the mind to believe what is false, nor the will to love that which will make it miserable. These two powers are therefore free; and by these we can render ourselves perfect—know God perfectly, love Him, obey Him, please Him—vanquish all vices, acquire all virtues, and so make ourselves holy, and the fellows of God. These principles, truly diabolic in their pride, lead to other errors—such as that the soul is a portion of the Divine substance, that grief and death are not evils, that we may kill ourselves when we are in such trouble that we may believe God summons us, etc. “As for Montaigne—of whom you wish me also, my dear sir, to speak—being born in a Christian country, he makes profession of the Catholic religion, and so far there is nothing peculiar about him. But in the search for a system of morals dictated by reason without the light of faith, he has to lay down his principles on this supposition, and to consider man apart from revelation. He conceives things in such a universal uncertainty that doubt itself is seized with uncertainty, and doubts whether it doubts. His scepticism returns upon itself in a perpetual circle without repose, opposing equally those who maintain that all is uncertain, and those who maintain that nothing is, so utterly indisposed is he to any fixity. In this doubt which doubts itself, and this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, is to be found the essence of his thought. He cannot express it by any positive term; for if he was to say that he doubts, he betrays himself by making it certain that he doubts; and this being formally against his intention, he can only explain himself by an interrogation. Not wishing to say, I do not know, he can only ask, What do I know? He has made this his device, putting it under a pair of balances, which, weighted in each scale by a contradiction, hangs in perfect equilibrium. In other words, he is pure Pyrrhonist. This is the point round which turn all his discourses and all his essays. This is the only thing which he