silence the Christian's artillery by
the licentious scoffings of the most extravagant and unreasonable
skepticism.

Modesty is the legitimate daughter of true philosophy; but dogmatism,
unless the offspring of infallible authority, is the ill-bred child of
ignorance and arrogance. Every man, then, who seeks to make proselytes to
his skepticism by converting his doubts into arguments, is anything but a
philosopher or a philanthropist.

One of the most alarming signs of this age is the ignorance and
recklessness of the youthful assailants of the Bible. Our cities, villages
and public places of resort are thronged with swarms of these Lilliputian
volunteers in the cause of skepticism. Apprenticed striplings, and sprigs
of law and physic, whose whole reading of standard authors on general
science, religion, or morality, in ordinary duodecimo, equals not the
years of their unfinished, or just completed minority, imagine that they
have got far in advance of the vulgar herd, and are both philosophers and
gentlemen if they have learned at second hand, a few scoffs and sneers at
the Bible, from Paine, Voltaire, Bolingbroke, or Hume. One would think,
could he listen to their impudence, that Bacon, Newton, Locke, and all the
great masters of science, were very pigmies, and that they themselves were
sturdy giants of extraordinary stature in all that is intellectual,
philosophic and learned. These would-be baby demagogues are a public
nuisance to society, whose atheistic breath not unfrequently pollutes the
whole atmosphere around them, and issues in a moral pestilence among that
class who regard a fine hat and a cigar as the infallible criteria of a
gentleman and scholar.

These creatures have not sense enough to doubt, nor to think sedately on
any subject; and therefore, we only notice them while defining the ground
occupied by the unbelievers of this generation. They prudently call
themselves skeptics, but imprudently carry their opposition to the Bible,
beyond all the bounds embraced in their own definitions of skepticism. A
skeptic can only _doubt_, never _oppugn_ the gospel. He becomes an
atheist, or an infidel, bold and dogmatic, as soon as he opens his mouth
against the Bible.

Were we philosophically to class society as it now exists in this country
in reference to the gospel, we should have believers, unbelievers, and
skeptics. We would find some who have voluntarily received the apostolic
testimony as true; others wh