Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Scott

Scott skewers a posture that still feels strangely modern: the lazy swagger of disbelief. “Vulgar incredulity” isn’t skepticism as a virtue; it’s skepticism as a social pose, a shortcut that confuses dismissal with intelligence. The sentence is built to shame that pose. “Vulgar” does double duty, meaning both coarse and common. Scott implies this isn’t a rare vice among cranks; it’s a fashionable habit of mind, a crowd-pleasing way to look superior without doing the work.

The key verb pairing is the tell: “doubt” versus “examine.” Doubt is cheap, instantaneous, performative. Examination is slow, often tedious, and it risks changing you. Scott’s intent is to defend disciplined inquiry, but also to defend the legitimacy of inherited narratives - historical memory and religious tradition - against the Enlightenment-era temptation to treat anything old as suspect by default. He wrote in a period when historical criticism, secular rationalism, and anti-clerical politics were reshaping public life; the French Revolution had made “reason” feel both liberating and terrifying. Scott, the great popularizer of national history through the novel, had a stake in preserving the authority of the past without pretending it’s beyond scrutiny.

The subtext is less “believe everything” than “earn your disbelief.” He’s warning that cynicism can be its own credulity: a faith in one’s own cleverness, maintained by refusing the inconvenient labor of reading sources, weighing testimony, and sitting with ambiguity. In that sense, Scott anticipates the modern skeptic who fact-checks only to confirm contempt.