"Many see, with alarm and distress fast deepening into silent despair, religious faith in themselves and others fading into a dim uncertainty as to everything beyond the world of sense. These men are skeptics, involuntary skeptics, as to everything. They would believe in God, but they find only a possibility of his existence in physical science, and his alleged revelation as doubtful for critics as himself; they would believe in their own immortality, but they can only hope it is real; they feel, too clearly for their happiness, that with the fundamental doctrines of Christianity they give up the quickening spirit of modern civilization, but the light which shows the abyss at whose brink they stand reveals no way of escape. They have seen the religions they may still formally profess, qualify and make meaningless one tenet after another, concede this point, silently abandon that, try vainly to compromise over and over again with a constantly advancing spirit of materialism and negation, until the very idea that there be any fixed, immutable relgious truth, has become strange to them. And, while they have lost so much, they have gained nothing".

- Charles J Bonaparte, 1884