uld naturally
be expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth and fortieth essays
hereinbefore cited, and in his discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As
is complained by Dean Church:[167] "His views, both of life and death,
are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to
believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously
of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are
such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His
profession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of
showing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism,
than the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ideals; for he
indicates alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his sense of the
folly of insisting on the whole body of dogma. When fanatical
Protestants, uncritical of their own creed, affected to doubt the
sincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, he was naturally piqued.
But he was more deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when the few
but keen freethinkers of the time treated the THEOLOGIA NATURALIS of
Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a
feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to
retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some
ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the
APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but
with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation
of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For
himself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, of the school of
Cicero and Seneca; and as regards that side of his own thought he is not
at all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally protested against all
attempts to bring deity down to human conceptions, while himself doing
that very thing, as every theist needs must.

Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the traditional deism of the
pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian
faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But,
whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be
by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to
agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his
first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all
appearance carrying further the i