boughs, leaves, and fruits,
show us ugly taloned roots turned-up into the air,--and no growth,
only death and misery going on!

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; It is moral
also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by
believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A
sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something
he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and
digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which
he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest, and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole?
Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dextrous
Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the
world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in.
Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which
also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so
abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth! Consider them, with their
tumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence,--the wretched
Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without
quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and
amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to
the House, all wrapt and bandaged; he 'has crawled out in great bodily
suffering,' and so on;--_forgets_, says Walpole, that he is acting the
sick man; in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and
oratorically swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the
strangest mimetic life, half hero, half quack, all along. For indeed
the world is full of dupes; and you have to gain the _world's_
suffrage! How the duties of the world will be done in that case, what
quantities of error, which means failure, which means sorrow and
misery, to some and to many, will gradually accumulate in all
provinces of the world's business, we need not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's
maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a
godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the
whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and
what not, have derived their being, their chief necessity to be. This
must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one
hope of the world, my i