the answers to these objections are unknown to him.  Here is a very precise passage, taken from the excursus on the Manichaeans, which is found at the end of the second edition of his Dictionary:  ’For the greater satisfaction of the most punctilious readers, I desire to declare here’ (he says, p. 3148) ’that wherever the statement is to be met with in my Dictionary that such and such arguments are irrefutable I do not wish it to be taken that they are so in actuality.  I mean naught else than that they appear to me irrefutable.  That is of no consequence:  each one will be able to imagine, if he pleases, that if I deem thus of a matter it is owing to my lack of acumen.’  I do not imagine such a thing; his great acumen is too well known to me:  but I think that, after having applied his whole mind to magnifying the objections, he had not enough attention left over for the purpose of answering them.

85.  M. Bayle confesses, moreover, in his posthumous work against M. le Clerc, that the objections against faith have not the force of proofs.  It is therefore ad hominem only, or rather ad homines, that is, in relation to the existing state of the human race, that he deems these objections irrefutable and the subject unexplainable.  There is even a passage where he implies that he despairs not of the possibility that the answer or the explanation may be found, and even in our time.  For here is what he says in his posthumous Reply to M. le Clerc (p. 35):  ’M.  Bayle dared to hope that his toil would put on their mettle some of those great men of genius who create new systems, and that they could discover a solution hitherto unknown.’  It seems that by this ‘solution’ he means such an explanation of Mystery as would penetrate to the how:  but that is not necessary for replying to the objections.

86.  Many have undertaken to render this how comprehensible, and to prove the possibility of Mysteries.  A certain writer named Thomas Bonartes Nordtanus Anglus, in his Concordia Scientiae cum Fide, claimed to do so.  This work seemed to me ingenious and learned, but crabbed and involved, and it even contains indefensible opinions.  I learned from the Apologia Cyriacorum of the Dominican Father Vincent Baron that that book was censured in Rome, that the author was a Jesuit, and that he suffered for having published it.  The Reverend Father des Bosses, who now teaches Theology in the Jesuit College of Hildesheim, and who has combined [122] rare erudition with great acumen, which he displays in philosophy and theology, has informed me that the real name of Bonartes was Thomas Barton, and that after leaving the Society he retired to Ireland, where the manner of his death brought about a favourable verdict on his last opinions.  I pity the men of talent who bring trouble upon themselves by their toil and their zeal.  Something of like nature happened in time past to Pierre Abelard, to Gilbert de la Porree, to John Wyclif, and in our day to the Englishman Thomas Albius, as well as to some others who plunged too far into the explanation of the Mysteries.