hear of atoms in divinity."[1] To some minds this array of antinomies presents a far more imposing and hostile front than to others; the catalogue of doubts is stereotyped in their book of life; and this in spite of an incessant longing for riddance of the negative, and for full assurance of the positive. John Stirling and William Sidney Walker are types of this class. It has been observed[2] that there are many, especially men whose business makes them much conversant with the world, to whose minds a scepticism like that of Voltaire is not only a natural element, but one in which they feel contented, and out of which they seek not for escape. Not to this order belong the sceptics of whom we speak—far less to the coarse scoffing ribalds of militant infidelity, the unclean spirits of aggressive materialism. Nor ought they to be confounded with such, as they sometimes are. Charles Lamb remarked that the impediments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of man; some believe upon weak principles, others cannot feel the efficacy of the strongest. How does Tennyson meet the sweeping assumption that doubt is devil-born? "I know not," he replies—
I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touched a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true.
"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."[3]
A thoughtful writer has said, that while there is a temper of mind inventive of doubts, the cleverness in which it originates being as dexterity of finger without wisdom of heart, there is on the other hand a scepticism arising inevitably in a life of right endeavour and desire, and that this is one of the best moral indications, though to pass through it be one of the most painful moral processes.[4] It is Mr. Moultrie's own remark, that a mind so subtle and speculative as Walker's could hardly by possibility avoid, during the course of its development, the passage through a fiery trial of doubt or unbelief; "few, probably, of his most intellectual contemporaries at Cambridge—very few certainly of the academical generation immediately succeeding his—escaped altogether from the same ordeal." The reasonings of some of these dubitators were such as Wordsworth describes:
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds,
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours. …
… till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in everything, they lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.[5]
They were nothing if not critical; ill at ease except when breaking
