Horace, and a long list besides.
The moderns have had their Gassendi, Diderot, Condillac, Hobbes,
Hume, Paine, Leopardi, Shelley, and now have their Feuerbach,
Vogt, Moleschott, and scores of others needless to be named. And
although in any argument from authority the company of the great
believers would incomparably outshine and a thousand times
outweigh the array of deniers, this does not alter the obvious
fact that there are certain phenomena which are natural
provocatives of doubt and whose troubling influence scarcely any
one can always escape. Homer, in giving expression to Hector's
confidence of victory over the Greeks, makes him wish that he were
but as sure of entering the state of the immortal gods.48 When
some one asked Dr. Johnson, "Have we not proof enough of the
immortality of the soul?" he replied, "I want more." Davenant of
whom Southey says, "I know no other author who has so often
expressed his doubts respecting a future state and how burdensome
he felt them" writes, "But ask not bodies doom'd to die,
To what abode they go: Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy,
It is not safe to know."

Charles Lamb writes, "If men would honestly confess their
misgivings, (which few men will,) there are times when the
strongest Christian of us has reeled under questionings of such
staggering obscurity." Many a man, seeing nature hang her veil of
shifting glories above the silent tombs of vanished generations,
voiceless now forever, entertaining innumerable contradictory
queries amidst feelings of decay and sights of corruption, before
the darkness of unknown futurity might piteously exclaim, without
deserving blame,

"I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down
hurls me to the ground."

Who that has reached maturity of reflection cannot appreciate and
sympathize somewhat with these lines of Byron, when he stands
before a lifeless form of humanity?

"I gazed, as oft I have gazed the same, To try if I could wrench
aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make, a
faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: but
where? Five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far!
And is this blood, then, form'd but to be shed? Can every element
our elements mar? Can air, earth, water, fire, live and we dead?
We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more."

48 Iliad, lib, viii. Il. 538-540.

Doubt is not sin, but rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a
suggesti