a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science
following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim
continues:--

The sages say: I tell thee no!
with equal faith all Faiths receive;
None more, none less, for Doubt is Death:
they live the most who most believe.

Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a man who believes in
everything equally and generally may be said to believe in
nothing. It is not a simple European view which makes honest
Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition
to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is
worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic
interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if
it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man,
fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and
reflective powers,--a simple absurdity! It produced a
Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest
tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the
Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted heretic lest
the latter by lapse from grace lose his immortal soul.

But this vein of speculation, which bigots brand as "Doubt,
Denial, and Destruction;" this earnest religious scepticism; this
curious inquiry, "Has the universal tradition any base of fact?";
this craving after the secrets and mysteries of the future, the
unseen, the unknown, is common to all races and to every age.
Even amongst the Romans, whose model man in Augustus' day was