Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. xr. Conclusion.
301
these devout and reverential minds did ? Would not
natural impatience rather prevail, and the more immediate
and obvious effect of a contrast be yielded to. And if so,
are not the generality of men spared a severe trial, with
probably an unfavourable issue, in not having
in the first
instance this deeper sense of ignorance at all ? Is not
their ignorance veiled in mercy from them by a kind Pro
vidence ; so that, with respect to these truths, they go on
for their whole lives, thinking they know a great deal more
than they do ? Nor does this apply to the uninstructed
and uncultivated part of mankind only, but perhaps even
more strongly to the learned and controversial class. For,
certainly, to hear the way in which some of this class
argue, and draw inferences from the incomprehensible
truths of revelation, carrying them, as they say, into their
consequences and logical results, upon which, however
remote and far-fetched, they yet insist, as if they were of
the very substance of the primary truth itself; to judge,
I say, from the long and fine trains of inferences drawn by
some theologians from mysterious doctrines, endless dis
tinctions spun one out of the other in succession, and issu
ing in subtleties which baffle all comprehension, and are,
in short, mere words and nothing more, but for which, so
long as at each successive step there has been an inference
(or something which to the controversially wound-up intel
lect or fancy at the time appeared such), these persons
claim the most absolute deference ; as if some subtlest con
ception of the argumentative brain, some needle s point so
inconceivably minute,
that not one man in ten thousand
could even see it once if he tried for his whole life, were of
the very foundation of the faith ; to judge, I say, from
such a mode of arguing from religious truths, one cannot
avoid two reflections ; one, that such persons do not know
their own ignorance the ; other, that it is probably a mercy
to them that they do not. They do not know their own
ignorance with respect to these truths ; for if they did,
they would see that such incomprehensible
truths were not
known premisses, and could not be argued upon as such,
or made foundation of unlimited inference : and that they