Michel de Montaigne has given an interesting account of this ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde. His father thought so highly of it that he set his son, the immortal Essayist, to translate it into French: a task which it were needless to say he performed in a very admirable manner, though the sire did not live to see the work in type and in the hands of the public he was anxious to reach through its means. The book, says Montaigne, is composed by a Spaniard, in indifferent Latin--_basti d’un Espagnol, baraguiné des terminaisons Latines_--but well adapted to meet a want of the day. The novelties of Luther coming into vogue and shaking old beliefs, Sabunde, as he thinks, ‘gives very good advice against a disease that ever tends towards execrable atheism.’ If Sabunde does give _tres bon advis_, his ‘Book of the Creatures’ is nevertheless the text from which the most sceptical perhaps of the whole series of the ‘Essays’ is written; and if the ‘Theologia Rationalis’ fell into the hands of the youthful Michael Servetus, as we believe it must almost necessarily have done, we have no difficulty in imagining that it influenced him in a still greater degree, and not much otherwise than it did young Michel de Montaigne. A rational exposition of God’s revelation of himself in nature, we apprehend, must have been a craving in the soul of the serious Spaniard still more than in that of the lively Gascon.[6] But there is another writer whose influence on his age and the progress of free thought it is impossible to estimate too highly, and from whose teaching Servetus on his death-walk owned that he had had _something_. This is Erasmus. What Servetus had he does not say. Whatever it may have been, it was unaccompanied by the caution and cold discretion that distinguished the great scholar of Rotterdam. In the Scholia which Erasmus added to his Greek New Testament, however, we fancy we see heralds of the far bolder and more original exegetical annotations with which Servetus, under his assumed name of Villanovanus, accompanied his reprint of the Pagnini Bible, which we shall have to speak of by and by.