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vol. ii. p. 101. (Cheers). That is a very strong utterance to proceed from 
Niebuhr. The father, though he could not himself believe in the Old and 
New Testaments, still felt such an amount of discomfort about his own 
position that in educating his child he determined to bring it up in the 
belief which he himself had ceased to possess. With reference to the question 
of physiognomy, we must remember that (with most of us) lines will deepen 
and wrinkles will come with age, also that Froissart charges the English with 
being serious even in their pleasures, and certainly Dr. Thornton’s friends 
must be exceptions, if nine-tenths of them have happy expressions. 
I agree that unbelievers, as a rule, carry a painful expression, but my expe- 
rience leads me to deny that nine-tenths of Christians are happy-looking, 
at least among Englishmen. 
Rev. F. N. Oxenham. — The observation whichl specially wish to make arises 
partly from what fell from the first speaker. The industrious author of the 
paper has not done one thing which we should have wished : he has not 
pointed out to us the very essential difference between two sorts of scepticism. 
It seems to me that if we are really to meet the growing difficulties of scepti- 
cism, we must be most careful to distinguish between the doubt which arises 
from a desire not to believe what is put before a man as truth, and the doubt 
which arises from a real genuine difficulty, in being convinced that a certain 
statement does rest on sufficient grounds. One I should call moral, the 
other intellectual. It seems to me that the scepticism with which we have 
to deal ought to be regarded as simply intellectual, and Dr. Thornton has told 
us that he regards it as an intellectual disease. If it really is an honest in- 
capacity in any mind to see that a particular statement rests on a sufficient 
basis of truth, then all these arguments as to “ attempts to make us give up 
Christianity” are beside the mark. I cannot help thinking, and I say it regret- 
fully, as a clergyman, that we have failed to do much that we might have done 
in the way of winning over sceptics by assuming, to begin with, that they were 
morally wrong. If we began by sympathizing with their doubts, and agreeing 
with them that truth is so precious that we cannot allow an imposture to 
usurp its place ; if we gave them more credit, not for wishing to undermine 
Christianity, but for feeling genuine difficulties in ascertaining the grounds 
on which certain statements were originally made, we might do a great deal 
more for them than we have done. When we impute to them bad motives, 
and tell them they are not respectable,* the sceptic naturally says, “ A person 
who speaks in that way does not understand my state of mind, and has no 
sympathy with me.” I cannot help thinking that the scepticism which Dr. 
Thornton has called intellectual is entirely different from that which he 
described in the earlier pages of his paper. If wc had been told at the be- 
ginning of this paper that the author regards scepticism as a moral disease, 
which desires not to believe God’s word, and which wishes to explain God’s word 
Dr. Thornton said this of the history of scepticism, not of sceptics. — E d. 
