The Skeptic's Folly by William Ewart Gladstone

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 23, 1912

The Skeptic's Folly

By William Ewart Gladstone

I CONTEND that the skeptic is of all men on earth the most inconsistent and irrational. He uses a plea against religion which he never uses against anything he wants to do or any idea he wants to embrace; namely, the want of demonstrative evidence. Every day and all day long he is acting on evidence not demonstrative; he eats the dish he likes, without certainty that it is not poisoned; he rides the horse he likes, without certainty that the animal will not break his neck; he sends out of the house a servant he suspects, without demonstration of guilt; he marries the woman he likes, with no absolute knowledge that she loves him; he embraces the political opinion he likes, perhaps without any study at all, certainly without demonstrative evidence of its truth. But when he comes to religion, he is seized with a great intellectual scrupulosity, and demands as a precondition of homage to God what everywhere else he dispenses with, and then ends with thinking himself more rational than other people.—W. E. Gladstone.