198 MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN 



conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its means 

 to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect 

 of the wise became a childish jargon. 



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. Some- 

 where, in mid air between the disputants, like 

 hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, 

 the truth hangs undiscerned. And in the mean- 

 while 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 con- 

 formity 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. I remember taking 



