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.