So his steps might be steady and bold ones

...upon consideration of the difficulty, or rather impossibility, for mankind to arrive to the assured knowledge of those paths which are necessary for him to walk in to bring him to beatitude, that so his steps might be steady and bold ones; I concluded, that since God would have dealt more hardly with mankind than with all other creatures besides, if to every one of them he had assigned due and proportionable means to bring them to the utmost period of their nature, and should have left only him in the dark among inevitable precipices. It was certain he had bequeathed to him a science or art whereby to govern himself and steer his course so as to be able to arrive safely into his wished haven, and to that end which he was created for.

— from Discourse Concerning Infallibility in Religion by Kenelm Digby.

Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) was an English courtier and diplomat, natural philosopher, and a leading Roman Catholic during and immediately following the English Civil War. The son of Sir Everard Digby, a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot seeking to blow up the parliament building in London, Digby was raised Protestant but returned to his father’s faith after his wife’s death. Running in the same circles in Paris as Rene Descartes, Digby remained a staunch defendant of traditional views on the body and soul — which Descartes would rent apart in his own work.