His wisdom leads him to see not only the folly of mankind, but also his own folly and weakness, which he does not strive to conceal, but relates with amusing candor. “I have, a kind of raving, fanciful behavior that retireth well into myselfe: and on the other side a grosse and childish ignorance of many ordinary things: by means of which two qualities I have in my daies committed five or six as sottish trickes as any one whatsoever: which to my derogration may be reported.... “For my part, I may in generall wish to be other than I am: I may condenme and mislike my universall forme: I may beseech God to grant me an undefiled reformation and excuse my natural weaknesse: but me seemeth I ought to tearme this repentance, no more than the displeasure of being neither an Angell nor Cato.... “When I consult with my age of my youthe’s proceedings, I finde that commonly (according to my opinion) I managed them in order. This is all my resistance is able to perform. I flatter not myselfe: in like circumstances I should be ever the same. It is not a spot, but a whole dye that staynes mee. I acknowledge no repentence (that) is superficiall, meane, and ceremonious. “Crosses and afflictions (works of penance) make me doe nothing but curse them. They are for people that cannot be arroused but by the whip.... The happy life (in my opinion, not as said Antisthenes, the happy death,) is it that makes man’s happinesse in this world. “I have not preposterously busied myselfe to tie the taile of a Philosopher unto the head and bodie of a varlet: nor that this paultrie end, should disavow and belie the fairest soundest and longest part of my life. I will present myselfe and make a generall muster of my whole, everywhere uniformally. Were I to live againe, it should be as I have already lived. I neither deplore the past, nor dread what is to come.” The man who can speak so of himself is not likely to hold up any universal standard of faith or practice. He is not the man with the message for humanity, as were the Reformers and their enemies in the church. He is not a partisan because he has gone beyond such dilemmas. His knowledge of many books and of many and diverse explantations of the riddle of life and many kinds of goods and evils has made him see that there is no “one right way.” Reason has often been opposed to faith. Montaigne sees that reason too is faith, and faith all too human. There can be no finality. I suspect that his tolerance and aloofness during the Reformation in France were the result of a point of view somewhat similar to that of Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise,” and his story of the three rings. No one possessed the original, which was supposed to entitle the owner to the ancestral blessing and inheritance. All, like all religions, were counterfeits of the lost article.