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Updated: May 3, 2025
And they do not hesitate, in consequence, to give a colour to some fashionable vices, which no christian painter would admit into any composition, which was his own. To this it may be added, that, believing their own knowledge to be supreme, and their own system of morality to be the only enlightened one, they fall often into scepticism, and pass easily from thence to infidelity.
In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching scepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth.
My mother, as we know, had not the initial impulse to depart from ancient usage that my father had in his habitual scepticism. He had always been a nonconformist in his heart; she bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed conduct. Individual freedom, to him, was the only tolerable condition of life; to her it was confusion.
The strange visit and yet more strange departure of Mejnour filled the breast of the Neapolitan with awe and wonder, against which all the haughty arrogance and learned scepticism of his maturer manhood combated in vain. The apparition of Mejnour served, indeed, to invest Zicci with a character in which the Prince had not hitherto regarded him.
One wing called for relentless hostility, for an alliance of altar and throne to set up authority once more on its pedestal and to oppose at once the anarchy of democratic rule and the scepticism of free-thought. This ultramontane attitude this looking 'beyond the mountains' to a supreme authority in Rome to give stability in a shifting world found able and aggressive exponents.
Observing an alarm of scepticism in my eye, he thought proper to confirm his assertion with an oath. "Might it not have been a rabbit?" said I. "Rabbit, sir; d n me, think I didn't know a cat from a rabbit? Why one has got short ears and long tail, and t'other has got wicee wersee, as we calls it."
Her understanding, weakened perhaps by disease, and never accustomed to reason, was incapable of distinguishing between truth and error; and her temper, naturally enthusiastic, hurried her from one extreme to the other from thoughtless scepticism to visionary credulity.
Jenkins showed, indeed, remarkable presence of mind in every way. He prudently brought home the severed ear with him, and invited all patriotic Englishmen to look at it. Scepticism itself could not, for a while at all events, refuse to believe that the Spaniards had cut off Jenkins's ear, when, behold! there was the ear itself to tell the story.
It was for the honour of the Christian faith that the Christian boldly forced its tenets upon the scepticism of some, the repugnance of others, the sage contempt of the philosopher, the pious shudder of the people his very intolerance supplied him with his fittest instruments of success; and the soft Heathen began at last to imagine there must indeed be something holy in a zeal wholly foreign to his experience, which stopped at no obstacle, dreaded no danger, and even at the torture, or on the scaffold, referred a dispute far other than the calm differences of speculative philosophy to the tribunal of an Eternal Judge.
“Atheists should speak only of things perfectly clear, but it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material. “Atheism indicates force of mind, but only up to a certain point.” Some of the foregoing Thoughts may appear to our readers sufficient to warrant the charge of scepticism, already adverted to. Pascal certainly speaks at times both of human life and human reason in a contemptuous manner.
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