A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne's Essais, seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against the Protestants. Thus we find Daillé, at the outset of his work On the True Use of the Fathers, [545] complaining that when Protestants quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask "whence and in what way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets and apostles whose names and titles they bear." This challenge, rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili Ecclesiæ Romanæ Scepticismo (1688) [546] undertakes to show that Romanists themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make more skeptics than it won.