The other form of
scepticism, which might be traced in England from the low-minded
frivolities of the court of Charles the Second, was widely spread among the
weak, whose minds flinched from all earnest thought. They swelled the
number of the army of bold questioners upon the ways of God to Man, but
they were an idle rout of camp-followers, not combatants; they simply ate,
and drank, and died.
In 1697, Pierre Bayle published at Rotterdam, his "Historical and Critical
Dictionary," in which the lives of men were associated with a comment that
suggested, from the ills of life, the absence of divine care in the shaping
of the world. Doubt was born of the corruption of society; Nature and Man
were said to be against faith in the rule of a God, wise, just, and
merciful. In 1710, after Bayle's death, Leibnitz, a German philosopher
then resident in Paris, wrote in French a book, with a title formed from
Greek words meaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in which he met Bayle's
argument by reasoning that what we cannot understand confuses us, because
we see only the parts of a great whole. Bayle, he said, is now in Heaven,
and from his place by the throne of God, he sees the harmony of the great
Universe, and doubts no more. We see only a little part in which are many
details that have purposes beyond our ken. The argument of Leibnitz's
Theodicee was widely used; and although Pope said that he had never read
the Theodicee, his "Essay on Man" has a like argument.
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