understand it, as it belongs to him alone to assert it. Ph. This consideration appears to me a good one, and it is thus that I wish my definition to be understood. This same consideration confirms me also in my present opinion that the manner of speaking which opposes reason to faith, although it has weighty authority, is improper; for it is by reason that we verify what we must believe. Faith is a firm assent, and assent, regulated as it should be, can only be given upon good reasons. Thus he who believes without any reason for believing may be in love with his fancies, but it is not true that he seeks the truth, nor that he renders lawful obedience to his divine Master, who would have him make use of the faculties with which he has enriched him in order to preserve him from error. Otherwise if he is in the good way, it is by chance; and if in the bad, it is by his fault, for which he is accountable to God. Th. I commend you strongly, sir, when you wish faith to be grounded in reason: without this why should we prefer the Bible to the Koran or to the ancient books of the Brahmins? Our theologians also and other learned men have clearly recognized it, and it is this which has caused us to have such fine works concerning the truth of the Christian religion, and so many excellent proofs as have been put forward against the heathen and other unbelievers, ancient and modern. Wise persons also have always regarded as suspicious those who have maintained that it was not necessary to trouble themselves about reasons and proofs when it was a question of belief; an impossibility in fact unless to believe signifies to recite or repeat or to let pass without troubling themselves, as many people do, and as indeed is the character of some nations more than others. This is the reason why, when some Aristotelian philosophers of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, whose remains were still extant a long time after (as we may judge by the letters of the late Mr. Xaude and the Naudeana), desired to maintain two opposite truths, one philosophical, the other theological, the last Lateran Council under Leo X was right in opposing them, as I think I have already remarked. And a dispute wholly similar was raised at Helmstadt in former times between Daniel Hofmann, a theologian, and Corneille Martin, a philosopher, but with this difference, that the philosopher reconciled philosophy to revelation and the theologian wished to decline its use. But the Duke Julius, founder of the university, decided