The world’s a system of theology,

Read by the greatest strangers to the schools:

If honest, learn’d; and sages o’er a plough. 1140

Is not, Lorenzo, then, imposed on thee

This hard alternative; or, to renounce

Thy reason, or thy sense; or, to believe?

What then is unbelief? ’Tis an exploit;

A strenuous enterprise: to gain it, man 1145

Must burst through every bar of common sense,

Of common shame, magnanimously wrong: