Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

:oo Conclusion. CHAP. XI.
religion, as not only indistinct, but as no ideas at all, but
mere void ; and urge that persons are under a mistake in
supposing that they have anything really in their minds
when they profess to entertain these truths, not having,
as it is asserted, any idea of them. In this way, then,
the deeper perception of ignorance tends to lessen belief
to set them
in the truths of religion ; inclining persons
aside altogether as truths from which our understandings
are entirely separated by an impassable barrier, and with
which, therefore, as lying whoDy outside of us, we have no
concern. 1
Such being, then, the two arguments from human
ignorance, the two modes of using and applying the fact,
the question is, supposing the mass of men had that dis
tinct and clear perception of their ignorance which analy
tical minds acquire, how would they use it ? Would they
use it for the purpose of deepening their humility, chas
tising their curiosity, subduing their impatience ? Would
they frame themselves upon a pattern of intellectual sub
mission and be grateful for such a measure of insight into
religious truths as Grod had given them ? or would they
use and apply it in the other way, and, struck simply by
the force of the contrast between their knowledge in one
department and their ignorance in another, draw from it
the impatient inference, that because they did not see these
truths clearly, they did not
disconnected with
see them at all,
them? It is to
and were
be feared
rationally
that the natural impatience of the human mind would, in
the majority of instances, lean to the latter inference. It is
indeed true, and it is a cheering and consolatory fact, that
we see a broad division among the great analytical minds
on this head and that while some have drawn the ; argument
for unbelief from the fact of human ignorance, others have
drawn from it the argument for faith that to Hume and
;
Hobbes on the one side we may oppose Butler and Pascal
on the other. But could we expect that the generality of
men would exert that intellectual self-discipline which
1 This appears to have been Hume s state of mind with respect to
religious truths.