intellectual shallowness,
the unfortunate influence of plausible heresiarchs, and other
alternative roots of evil. They thus leave a way of escape, by which the
person who does not share their own convictions may still be credited
with a good moral character. Some persons, it is true, 'cannot see how a
man who deliberately rejects the Roman Catholic religion can, in the
eyes of those who earnestly believe it, be other than a rebel against
God.' They assure us that, 'as opinions become better marked and more
distinctly connected with action, the truth that decided dissent from
them implies more or less of a reproach upon those who hold them
decidedly, becomes so obvious that every one perceives it.' No doubt a
protestant or a sceptic regards the beliefs of a catholic as a reproach
upon the believer's understanding. So the man whose whole faith rests on
the miraculous and on acts of special intervention, regards the strictly
positive and scientific thinker as the dupe of a crude and narrow logic.
But this now carries with it no implication of moral obliquity. De
Maistre's rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of
horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the
very dregs of the ecclesiastical world.

Nor is it correct to say that 'when religious differences come to be,
and are regarded as, mere differences of opinion, it is because the
controversy is really decided in the sceptical sense.' Those who agree
with the present writer, for example, are not sceptics. They positively,
absolutely, and without reserve, reject as false the whole system of
objective propositions which make up the popular belief of the day, in
one and all of its theological expressions. They look upon that system
as mischievous in its consequences to society, for many reasons,--among
others because it tends to divert and misdirect the most energetic
faculties of human nature. This, however, does not make them suspect the
motives or the habitual morality of those who remain in the creed in
which they were nurtured. The difference is a difference of opinion, as
purely as if we refused to accept the undulatory theory of light; and we
treat it as such. Then reverse this. Why is it any more impossible for
those who remain in the theological stage, who are not in the smallest
degree sceptical, who in their heart of hearts embrace without a shadow
of misgiving all the mysteries of the faith, why is it any more
impossible