Re: Sending Faxes over the internet
Henry Sharp
having no certainty, apart from faith, whether man was created by a good
God, or by a wicked demon, 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 if we were awake. So that half of our life being passed in sleep, we
have on our own admission no idea of truth, whatever we may imagine. As all
our intuitions are, then, illusions, who knows whether the other half of our
life, in which we think we are awake, is not another sleep a little
different from the former, from which we awake when we suppose ourselves
asleep?
And who doubts that, if we dreamt in company, and the dreams chanced to
agree, which is common enough, and if we were always alone when awake, we
should believe that matters were reversed? In short, as we often dream that
we dream, heaping dream upon dream, may it not be that this half of our
life, wherein we think ourselves awake, is itself only a dream on which the
others are grafted, from which we wake at death, during which we have as few
principles of truth and good as during natural sleep, these different
thoughts which disturb us being perhaps only illusions like the flight of
time and the vain fancies of our dreams?
These are the chief arguments on one side and the other.
I omit minor ones, such as the sceptical talk against the impressions of
custom, education, manners, country and the like. Though these influence the
majority of common folk, who dogmatise only on shallow foundations, they are
upset by the least breath of the sceptics. We have only
Henry Sharp
Church is to abide. By the grace of God we have not come to that. Woe to
these priests! But we hope that God will bestow His mercy upon us that we
shall not be of them.
Saint Peter, Epistle ii: false prophets in the past, the image of future
ones.
889.... So that if it is true, on the one hand, that some lax monks and some
corrupt casuists, who are not members of the hierarchy, are steeped in these
corruptions, it is, on the other hand, certain that the true pastors of the
Church, who are the true guardians of the Divine Word, have preserved it
unchangeably against the efforts of those who have attempted to destroy it.
And thus true believers have no pretext to follow that laxity, which is only
offered to them by the strange hands of these casuists, instead of the sound
doctrine which is presented to them by the fatherly hands of their own
pastors. And the ungodly and heretics have no ground for publishing these
abuses as evidence of imperfection in the providence of God over His Church;
since, the Church consisting properly in the body of the hierarchy, we are
so far from being able to conclude from the present state of matters that
God has abandoned h