BAYLE’S DIARY.

Years of the             Years
Christian               of my
AEra                   age.

1669.  Tues., Mar. 19. 22.  I changed my religion—­next day I resumed
the study of logic.
1670.  Aug. 20. 23.  I returned to the reformed religion, and
made a private abjuration of the Romish
religion, in the hands of four ministers.

His brother was one of these ministers; while a catholic, Bayle had attempted to convert him, by a letter long enough to evince his sincerity; but without his subscription we should not have ascribed it to Bayle.

For this vacillation in his religion has Bayle endured bitter censure.  Gibbon, who himself changed his about the same “year of his age,” and for as short a period, sarcastically observes of the first entry, that “Bayle should have finished his logic before he changed his religion.”  It may be retorted, that when he had learnt to reason, he renounced Catholicism.  The true fact is, that when Bayle had only studied a few months at college, some books of controversial divinity by the catholics offered many a specious argument against the reformed doctrines.  A young student was easily entangled in the nets of the Jesuits.  But their passive obedience, and their transubstantiation, and other stuff woven in their looms, soon enabled such a man as Bayle to recover his senses.  The promises and the caresses of the wily Jesuits were rejected; and the gush of tears of the brothers, on his return to the religion of his fathers, is one of the most pathetic incidents of domestic life.

Bayle was willing to become an expatriated man; to study, from the love of study, in poverty and honour!  It happens sometimes that great men are criminated for their noblest deeds by both parties.

When his great work appeared, the adversaries of Bayle reproached him with haste, while the author expressed his astonishment at his slowness.  At first, “The Critical Dictionary,” consisting only of two folios, was finished in little more than four years; but in the life of Bayle this was equivalent to a treble amount with men of ordinary application.  Bayle even calculated the time of his headaches:  “My megrims would have left me had it been in my power to have lived without study; by them I lose many days in every month.”  The fact is, that Bayle had entirely given up every sort of recreation except that delicious inebriation of his faculties, as we may term it for those who know what it is, which he drew from his books.  We have his avowal:  “Public amusements, games, country jaunts, morning visits, and other recreations necessary to many students, as they tell us, were none of my business.  I wasted no time on them, nor in any domestic cares,—­never soliciting for preferment, nor busied in any other way.  I have been happily delivered from many occupations which were not suitable to my humour; and I have enjoyed the greatest and the most charming leisure that a man of letters could desire.  By such means an author makes a great progress in a few years.”