to preside.  That is the tendency of sundry good books that we have on the truth of religion, such as those of Augustinus Steuchus, of Du Plessis-Mornay or of Grotius:  for the true religion must needs have marks that the false religions have not, else would Zoroaster, Brahma, Somonacodom and Mahomet be as worthy of belief as Moses and Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless divine faith itself, when it is kindled in the soul, is something more than an opinion, and depends not upon the occasions or the motives that have given it birth; it advances beyond the intellect, and takes possession of the will and of the heart, to make us act with zeal and joyfully as the law of God commands.  Then we have no further need to think of reasons or to pause over the difficulties of argument which the mind may anticipate.

30.  Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors.  Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use of the commonest rules of logic and reason[92] with even a modicum of attention.  Instead of that, they become involved in oblique and ambiguous phrases, which give them a fine field for declamation, to make the most of their wit and their learning.  It would seem, indeed, that they have no wish to see the naked truth, peradventure because they fear that it may be more disagreeable than error:  for they know not the beauty of the Author of all things, who is the source of truth.

31.  This negligence is a general defect of humanity, and one not to be laid to the charge of any particular person. Abundamus dulcibus vitiis, as Quintilian said of the style of Seneca, and we take pleasure in going astray.  Exactitude incommodes us and rules we regard as puerilities.  Thus it is that common logic (although it is more or less sufficient for the examination of arguments that tend towards certainty) is relegated to schoolboys; and there is not even a thought for a kind of logic which should determine the balance between probabilities, and would be so necessary in deliberations of importance.  So true is it that our mistakes for the most part come from scorn or lack of the art of thinking:  for nothing is more imperfect than our logic when we pass beyond necessary arguments.  The most excellent philosophers of our time, such as the authors of The Art of Thinking, of The Search for Truth and of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, have been very far from indicating to us the true means fitted to assist the faculty whose business it is to make us weigh the probabilities of the true and the false:  not to mention the art of discovery, in which success is still more difficult of attainment, and whereof we have nothing beyond very imperfect samples in mathematics.