' Hence he concludes that we must
put ourselves wholly under the protection of ecclesiastical authority,
or completely break with it.
He never made a single step to withdraw himself from that authority.
He rather prides himself on having never allowed himself, by any
philosophy, to be turned away from his first and natural sic
opinions, and from the condition in which God had placed him; being
well aware of his own variability _volubilite_. 'Thus I have,
by the grace of God, remained wholly attached, without internal
agitation and troubles of conscience, to the ancient beliefs of our
religion, during the conflict of so many sects and party divisions
which our century has produced.' [10]
Receiving the holy Host, he breathed his last.
In the 'Apologie de Raymond Sebond,' Montaigne defends the 'Theologia
Naturalis' of the latter--a book in which the author, who was a medical
man, a philosopher, and a theologian, endeavours to prove that the Roman
Catholic dogmas are in harmony with the laws of nature. That which is
to be received in full faith, Sebond exerts himself to make
comprehensible by arguments of the reason. This book--so Montaigne
relates--had been given to his father, at the time when Luther's new
doctrines began to be popular, by a man of great reputation for
learning, Pierre Bunel, who 'well foresaw, by his penetration, [11]
that this budding disease would easily degenerate into an execrable
atheism.
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