Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more
complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were
changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is
not right, he would argue, but certainly not the anti-church
either. Men are not such fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor
yet are they so placed as to be ever wholly in the right.
Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants, like hovering Victory
in some design of a Greek battle, the truth hangs undiscerned. And
in the meanwhile what matter these uncertainties? Right is very
obvious; a great consent of the best of mankind, a loud voice
within us (whether of God, or whether by inheritance, and in that
case still from God), guide and command us in the path of duty. He
saw life very simple; he did not love refinements; he was a friend
to much conformity in unessentials. For (he would argue) it is in
this life as it stands about us, that we are given our problem; the
manners of the day are the colours of our palette; they condition,
they constrain us; and a man must be very sure he is in the right,
must (in a favourite phrase of his) be 'either very wise or very
vain,' to break with any general consent in ethics.
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