one. Advocacy
always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad
probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but
advocacy.

Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its
primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to
the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority
fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of
theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is
something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in
respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it
follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle
dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is
sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least
in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism,
that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion,
and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory
use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the
law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes
contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism
of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology,
that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science
of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the
word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save
by the testing of hypotheses.

Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the
theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where
you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be
thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next
the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo
dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its
arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more
scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by
giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it,
therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am
left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above
all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes
that it does not know. I