h, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]

A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning
an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and
comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical
parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief