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But for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not I sincere?
Vice rose to such a pitch that men doubted if the Mass really was idolatry! Knox said, from the pulpit, that if the sceptics were right, he was "miserably deceived."
Fortunately, at this moment, he did not see Camille, whose lips were a sinister smile. Young Frenchmen have become such sceptics! I made eyes at the bad boy, and on leaving the table I sent him to smoke a cigar in the park.
Leibnitz wrote his great “Essais de Théodicée,” for the purpose of refuting these conclusions of Bayle, as well as those of all other sceptics, and of reconciling his system with the divine attributes. In the preface to his work he says, “We show that evil has another source than the will of God; and that we have reason to say of moral evil, that God only permits it, and that he does not will it.
In other words, it is laid down as an uncontrovertible principle that "the mental can only enter into direct relations with the mental." That is what may be called "the principle of Idealism." This principle seems to me very disputable, and it is to me an astonishing thing that the most resolute of sceptics Hume, for example should have accepted it without hesitation.
For ethics, in such an application, ends either in the attempt at the procurement of extreme personal sanctity or the obtaining of individual pleasure the foundation of patriotism is sapped, the sentiment of friendship is destroyed. So it was with the period of Grecian faith inaugurated by Socrates, developed by Plato, and closed by the Sceptics.
The disintegration of the prevalent forms of religious belief, the rapid multiplication of sects, the increase in the ranks of intellectual sceptics, the fashionable detractions from, and perversions of, the Holy Scriptures, acting with the influences already mentioned, may well cause alarm.
Of course the sceptics will claim that the medium may play the instruments himself or herself, and thus give ground for the claim of fraud; consequently in the case of public seances, and many private ones as well, the medium will insist upon having his or her hands tied, and other precautions taken to eliminate the possibility of fraud and deception.
It is not to my purpose to enter now into a philosophical discussion of the law as it appears under any of these names. We see that it exists. It is beyond reasonable dispute. Whatever else sceptics may carp at and criticise in the Bible, they must acknowledge the truth of this.
But even in the Section of Letters the majority of the students are sceptics at bottom sceptics of discreet and good-natured average views. Of course they are professors before everything else, though they are a trifle ashamed of it; and, as professors, they judge things with no little pedantic irony, devoured by a spirit of criticism, and quite incapable of creating anything themselves.
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