The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 42

Quacks of Every Sort

Quacks of Every Sort,

Surface-skimmers, and bark-peelers, cheats and foulsome deceivers, who manage to make us pay them for their knavery. And why? Because we are not careful thinkers. Too many of us are well described by the words used by a certain polemical lady in Dunedin when addressing those who had been accustomed to attend upon her ministry—men and women who pride themselves upon being "free and independent thinkers," "My

trusting

hearers." Yes, well she knew whose brains they allowed to do the "free thinking" for them. "Trusting hearers" they truly were, and so are too many who do not think so. "Trusting hearers," "Trusting readers," yet self laudators, crammed with hackneyed platitudes, who cannot tell a fact from an assumption, nor trouble themselves to learn the difference between an assertion and a demonstration; but, having espoused the cause of some particular public talker, or free thinking dogmatic—

They have sworn to defend him,
Or die by his side,
For a Free-thinker never can yield,

to truth or reason if his leader should chance to point another way.

I want to see congregations, and audiences of all sorts, which will not only eagerly listen to the results of laborious thought, but which will demand from every instructor