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A nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his Christian faith is the paradoxical subject of Bishop Blougram's Apology, and it is one which admirably suited that side of Browning's genius which leaned towards intellectual casuistry.
We listened to just such a pamphlet as Rameau's Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save the sceptic's adopted article of belief the omnipotence, omniscience, and universal applicability of money.
"O Vivian! you speak with a sweet voice, but with a sceptic's spirit. You know not what I know." "Tell me, then, my Amalia; let me share your secrets, provided they be your sorrows." "Almost within this hour, and in this park, there has happened that which " and here her voice died, and she looked fear-fully round her. "Nay, fear not; no one can harm you here, no one shall harm you.
The translation into the dialect required by the allegorical situation, of a sceptic's aversion for gross superstition on the one hand, and for gross hedonism on the other, is forced and wooden. The most interesting of the three sections is the second, containing a discussion in which the respective parts are taken by a deist, a pantheist, a subjective idealist, a sceptic, and an atheist.
Within the archway, over the parlour door, was a plaster bust of Socrates; but this had met with no better treatment than the statues, having accidentally got its face turned to the wall as though in disgrace, or as if in despair of any really practical wisdom being allowed to have sway in the sceptic's household.
So, then, if admiration be the first fact if the sense of it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system, upraises itself if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger to point at with scorn.
Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.
"As he spoke of that volley of musketry I glanced across with a shudder at Beauchamp, and the look of stony horror on that handsome sceptic's face was not to be forgotten." Cameron.
Such critics lose sight of the fact that, in the first place, none of those who know anything want to confute or convince sceptics, or trouble themselves in the slightest degree about the sceptic's attitude one way or the other; and in the second, they fail to understand how much better it is for that sceptic that he should gradually grow into an intellectual appreciation of the facts of nature, instead of being suddenly introduced to them by a knock-down blow, as it were.
More than once Mary had taken courage, and had talked to her grandmother of the world beyond, the blessed hope of re-union with the friends we have lost, in a new and brighter life, only to be met by the sceptic's cynical smile, the materialist's barren creed. 'My dearest, we know nothing except the immutable laws of material life.
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