ignorance.  To vindicate the wisdom of such a constitution may be impossible; but the fact cannot be denied.  The Christian admits the difficulty alike in relation to religion and to the affairs of this world.  He believes, with Butler, that ’probability is the guide of life’;—­that man may have sufficient evidence, in a thousand cases,—­varying, however, in different individuals,—­to warrant his action, and a reasonable confidence in the results, though that evidence is very far removed from certitude;—­that similarly the mass of men are justified in saying that they know a thousand facts of history to be true, though they never had the opportunity, or capacitor, of thoroughly investigating them, and that the great facts of science are true, though they may know no more of science than of the geology of the moon;—­that the statesman, the lawyer, and the physician are justified in acting, where they yet are compelled to acknowledge that they act only on most unsatisfactory calculations of probabilities, and amidst a thousand doubts and difficulties;—­that you, Mr. Fellowes, are justified in endeavoring to enlighten the common people on many important subjects connected with political and social science, in which it is yet quite certain that not one in a hundred thousand can ever go to the bottom of them; of which very few can do more than attain a rough and crude notion, and in which the bulk must act solely because they are persuaded that other men know more about the matters in question than themselves;—­all which, say we Christians, is true in relation to the Christian religion, the evidence for which is plainer, after all, than that on which man in ten thousand cases is necessitated to hazard his fortune or his life.  If you follow out Mr. Newman’s principle, I think you must with Harrington liberate mankind from the necessity of acting altogether in all the most important relations of human life.  If it be thought not only hard that men should be called perpetually to act on defective, grossly defective evidence, but still harder that they should possess varying degrees even of that evidence, it may be said that the difference perhaps is rather apparent than real.  Those whom we call profoundly versed in the more difficult matters which depend on moral evidence, are virtually in the same condition as their humbler neighbors; they are profound only by comparison with the superficiality of these last.  Where men must act, the decisive facts, as was said in relation to history, may be pretty equally grasped by all; and as for the rest, the enlargement of the circle of a man’s knowledge is, in a still greater proportion, the enlargement of the circle of his ignorance; for the circumscribing periphery lies in darkness.  Doubts, in proportion to the advance of knowledge, spring up where they were before unknown; and though the previous ignorance of these was not knowledge, the knowledge of them (as Harrington has said) is little better than an increase of our ignorance.”