Montaigne gives his ideas of religion and philosophy in the longest of his essays, “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond.” He says that his father once requested him to translate a book on natural Theology by an unknown Spanish writer of this name. His remarks reveal the extent to which his mind is freed from both rationalism and religious dogmatism. “We should accompany our faith with all the reason we possess: yet always with this proviso, that we think it does not depend on us, and that all our strength and arguments can never attain to so supernaturall and divine a knowledge.” His remarkable detachment is seen in the following. He says that the best test of Verity is the practice of virtue. “And therefore was our good Saint Lewis in the right, when that Tartan King who was to become a Christian intended to come to Lions to kisse the Pope’s feet, and there to view the sanctitie he hoped to find in our lives and manners, instantly to divert him from it fearing lest our dissolute manners and licentious kind of life might scandalize him and so alter his opinion foreconceived of so sacred a religion. How be it the contrary happened to another who for the same effect being come to Rome, and there viewing the dissoluteness of the prelates and people of those days, was so much more confirmed in our religion, considering with himselfe what force and divinity it must of consequence have since it was able, amidst so many corruptions and so viciously poluted hands to maintain her dignitie and splendor.... “Our zeale worketh wonders when ever it secondeth our inclination toward hatred, cruelitie, ambition, avarice, detraction or rebellion.... Among other discommodities of our nature this is one, there is darkness in our minds, and in us not only necessity of erring but love of errors.... Presumption is our naturall and originall infirmitie. Of all creatures, man is the most miserable and fraile, and therewithall the proudest and disdainfullest ... he ascribeth divine conditions unto himselfe that he selecteth and separateth himselfe from out the ranke of other creatures.... By what comparison from them to us doth he conclude the brutishness he ascribeth unto them? When I am playing with my cat who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I in gaming with her? We entertain one another with mutuall apish tricks.” “We understand them (the beasts) no more than they us. By the same reason may they as well esteem us Beasts, as we them. It is no great marvell if we understand them not: no more doe we understand the Cornish, the Welch, or Irish.” He is persuaded he says, that if anyone who has pursued knowledge will “speak in conscience, he will confess that all the benefit he hath gotten by so tedious a pursuit, hath been that he hath learned to know his own weaknesse.”