There is a striking story in one of Montaigne’s essays about two new converts to Christianity. Full of expectation they visited a city famed for its saints and churches, hoping to study the holiness of the citizens’ behaviour and to learn more about their new religion. When they got to the city, however, things were not at all as they had imagined. All around they saw conflict, vice, and worse. One of the converts – a Tartar King - was so appalled that he left immediately, worried this experience with real-life Christians would ruin his faith for ever. But the other person had a very different reaction. He became yet more firmly attached to Christianity, thinking that it must be truly divine if it could maintain its dignity and power in the hands of such selfish people.

For Montaigne, who was writing in the midst of the French religious wars, this story was a challenge but also a comfort. He was calling on his readers to live out what they believed and to care for their neighbours, urging them to put their faith into practice for their own sake and for the sake of those around them. But he was also reminding them of the strength and power of the gospel even in the midst of our human weakness, even despite our own failings and fractiousness as individuals and as a church. For his story is above all a story of hope, of confidence in the gospel to transform even the most difficult situation and to shine with eternal light.