bar against a second St. Bartholomew massacre. A deed of this kind he
would submissively take to be an act of Heaven, shirking all
responsibility for, or discussion of, anything that 'begins to molest
him.' He merely says:--'Like those ancients who sacrificed their lives
for the welfare of their country, so they (the guardians of the State)
must be ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience. We who
are weaker, take easier, less risky parts.' [19]

In Montaigne, the Humanist, we read that beautiful passage (in his last
Essay [20]) where he says that 'those who would go beyond human nature,
trying to transform themselves into angels, only make beasts of
themselves.' [21] Yet, elsewhere [22] he writes that he shall be
exalted, who, renouncing his own natural means, allows himself to be
guided by means purely celestial--by which he clearly understands
the dogmas of Roman Catholicism.

As a humanistic thinker, Montaigne fears nothing more than any strivings
after transcendentalism. Such yearnings terrify him like inaccessible
heights. In the life of Sokrates, of that sage for whom he felt a special
preference, the 'ecstasies and daimons' greatly repel him. Nevertheless,
Montaigne, the mystic, attributes a great magic power to such daimons;
for he says: 'I, too, have sometimes felt within myself an image of such
internal agitations, as weak in the light of reason as they were violent
in instinctive persuasion or dissuasion (a state of mind more ordinary to
Sokrates), by which I have so profitably, and so happily, suffered myself
to be drawn on, that these mental agitations might perhaps be thought to
contain something of divine inspiration.' [23]

Montaigne, the admirer of classic antiquity, says that serving the
Commonwealth is the most honourable calling. [24] Acts without some