Faith may rise into miracles of might, as some few wise have shown: Faith may sink into credulities of weakness, as the mass of fools have witnessed. Therefore, in the first, saints and martyrs have fulfilled their mission, Conquering dangers, courting deaths, and triumphing in all. Therefore, in the last, the magician and the witch, victims of their own delusion, Have gained the bitter wages of impracticable sins. They believed in allegiance with Satan; they worked in that belief, And thereby earned the loss and harm of guilt that might not be. For, faith hath two hands; with the one it addeth virtue to indifferents; Yea, it sanctified a Judith and a Jael, for what otherwise were treachery and murder: With the other hand it heapeth crime even on impossibles or simples, And many a wizard well deserved the faggot for his faith: He trusted in his intercourse with evil, he sacrificed heartily to fiends, He withered up with curses to the limit of his will, and was vile, because he thought himself a villain. A great mind is ready to believe, for he hungereth to feed on facts, And the gnawing stomach of his ignorance craveth unceasing to be filled: A little mind is boastful and incredulous, for he fancieth all knowledge is his own, So will he cavil at a truth; how should it be true, and he not know it?-- There is an easy scheme, to solve all riddles by the sensual, And thus, despising mysteries, to feel the more sufficient; For it comforteth the foul hard heart, to reject the pure unseen, And relieveth the dull soft head, to hinder one from gazing upon vacancy. True wisdom, labouring to expound, heareth others readily; False wisdom, sturdy to deny, closeth up her mind to argument. The sum of certainties is found so small, their field so wide an universe, That many things may truly be, which man hath not conceived: The characters revealed of God are a strong mind's sole assurance That any strangeness may not stand a sober theme for faith. Ignorance being light denied, this ought to show the stronger in its view, But ignorance is commonly a double negative, both of light and morals: So, adding vanity to blindness, for ease, it taketh refuge in a doubt, And aching soon with ceaseless doubt, it finisheth the strife by misbelieving.