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If ever man were serious and earnest in his doubting, we believe him to be so. His is the wailing voice of one crying in the wilderness—of one who comes neither eating nor drinking; and they say, He hath a devil. Emerson, indeed, in his paradoxical way, assures us, that it is great believers who are always reckoned infidels; and that the spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of scepticisms. But to proffer Emerson's voucher fer Newman's faith were to risk allusion to Bardolph's proffered bond for Falstaff, concerning which Master Dumbleton said, he liked not the security. More consonant with public notions is the doctrine, that all scepticism is not only incompatible with spirituality, but is essentially akin to coarsest materialism—earthly, sensual, devilish. Mr. Trench, in his etymological survey of the word "libertine,"—which signified, according to its earliest use in French and in English, a speculative free-thinker in matters of religion and in the theory of morals or politics—explains its present usage by affirming, that by a sure process free-thinking does and will end in free-acting. Were the author of "Phases of Faith" an instance of this "sure process," there would be no lack of that sympathy which we have assumed to be lacking, between him and Horace. But, with no disposition to palliate the evils of a sceptical bias, and with a lively sensibility to the withering and chilling touch it pitilessly lays on hearts most ardent and hopes most-sacred, we yet demur—with Professor Newman before our eyes—to the sweeping generalisation which refuses to discriminate between a roving intellect and a wanton life, or which regards as one "common cry of curs" the mocking devilries of insensate scoffers, and the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners of hope. And therefore, as we would not "extenuate," so neither would we "set down aught in malice," nor, to use words put by Mr. Landor into the mouth of Andrew Marvel, "strangle a man because he has a narrow swallow ." Especially since