y of his
excellence, have considered as mean and ungrateful the low opinions
which men naturally have of themselves; and others, which have
thoroughly recognised how real is this vileness, have treated with proud
ridicule those feelings of greatness, which are equally natural to man.

"Lift your eyes to God," say the first; "see Him whom you resemble, and
who has created you to worship Him. You can make yourselves like unto
Him; wisdom will make you equal to Him, if you will follow it." "Raise
your heads, free men," says Epictetus. And others say, "Bend your eyes
to the earth, wretched worm that you are, and consider the brutes whose
companion you are."

What, then, will man become? Will he be equal to God or the brutes? What
a frightful difference! What, then, shall we be? Who does not see from
all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place,
that he anxiously seeks it, that he cannot find it again? And who shall
then direct him to it? The greatest men have failed.

432

Scepticism is true; for, after all, men before Jesus Christ did not know
where they were, nor whether they were great or small. And those who
have said the one or the other, knew nothing about it, and guessed
without reason and by chance. They also erred always in excluding the
one or the other.

_Quod ergo ignorantes, quaeritis, religio annuntiat vobis._[160]

433

_After having understood the whole nature of man._--That a religion may
be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its
greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the
Christian has known this?

434

The chief arguments of the sceptics--I pass over the lesser ones--are
that we have no certainty of the truth of these principles apart from
faith and revelation, except in so far as we naturally perceive them in
ourselves. Now this natural intuition is not a convincing proof of their
truth; since, having no certainty, apart from faith, whether man was
created by a good God, or by a wicked demon,[161] or by chance, it is
doubtful whether these principles given to us are true, or false, or
uncertain, according to our origin. Again, no person is certain, apart
from faith, whether he is awake or sleeps, seeing that during sleep we
believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we _are_ awake; we
believe that we see space, figure, and motion; we are aware of the
passage of time, we measure it; and in fact we act as