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at strengthening the impressions of nature. This is perhaps its chief object in reference to the moral virtues. They are the same in the Bible as in nature, except that they stand out with vastly greater prominence and are urged upon the conscience by much more lucid and powerful motives. But the points about which dissensions arise, rarely respect those truths which are common both to nature and revelation. The duties of justice, love, mercy, truth, respect to the rights of property, purity, filial reverence and the like, are too plain and too intimately grafted upon the moral sense, to admit of opposite positions and conflicting sentiments.

But those truths which are purely matters of revelation, such as the origin of evil, the mission, character and atonement of Christ, the nature of the Holy Spirit's work upon the heart, and points of a like character, have furnished, first and last, endless topics of debate. This is doubtless owing in part to our being unwilling to measure and define our knowledge of them by the sense of the language in which they are revealed. What but difference and debate can be expected from appending to this sense, matter extraneous to itself, or modifying it by the other materials of our knowledge? What is supernumerary to the meaning conveyed by the terms of the revelation, originating as it must from minds between whose habits or materials of thinking there is little or no uniformity, cannot fail to produce an endless diversity of results. Could a number of chemists, one of whom puts iron into his crucible with his gold, another copper, another zinc, and a fourth lead, expect that the compound would give the same result in every case? Whatever modification the statements of the Bible on subjects above human reason, receive from the knowledge derived from other sources, will serve to tarnish their lustre, just as every admixture tarnishes gold; and as the nature

and degree of this modification can be determined by no fixed rule, but depends wholly upon the caprice of different minds, there is no calculating the number or extent of the differences, which will spring up among a people who take such liberties with the inspired text. To prove the verity of our remarks, we need only advert to the endless differences of opinion that have first and last existed among christians, a large share of which, as all know who have looked into the subject, took their rise from this species of religious philosophizing.

The results of such a mode of treating revealed truth, are similar to what Lord Bacon, in the department of physics, calls "idols of the theatre," which are those false notions that arise from the tenets of philosophers, and perverted demonstrations.

"All the philosophies not founded upon the inductive system, like so many stage plays, represent nothing but theatrical and fictitious worlds." So in religious reasonings, all our ideas of things of which we have no means of knowledge but supernatural revelation, that do not exactly accord in form and degree to the sense of the language containing the revelation, lead to results equally theatrical and fictitious with perverted demonstrations in the natural sciences. The terms of the revelation, as we propose hereafter more fully to show, must be examined as we study nature, according to the true principles of induction, or our conclusions can neither be true nor uniform. Appending extraneous matter, while it cannot alter the thing in itself, will only serve to introduce falsehood and error into our conceptions.

Many seem to feel in regard to the Bible, as a scientific man might be supposed to, towards an ignorant wife, afraid to have it speak its own language lest its weakness should be betrayed. They are unwilling to have its plain statements go forth without being fenced around with their own interpretations,

or that its light should shine except through the shaded medium of their own reasoning. This assertion must be explained away, that one softened down and the whole tinged with their own hues, or it cannot be understood! But the question of the divine original and the consequent perfection of the Scriptures as a guide to faith and duty, being once settled, then, all we have to do is to acquaint ourselves with the precise import of its teachings; and with that conform our sentiment and practice as implicitly as we do to the facts of nature.

To allude to the illustration of a former chapter, we do not want to understand the nature of the process by which extraneous substances become incorporated with our bodies before we consent to eat; but millions daily receive food with as much confidence as if they understood all the mysteries of this process. We build houses, construct rail-roads, dig canals, and conduct innumerable branches of business, with reference to the attraction of gravity and the other laws of matter, though we know nothing of them beyond a few specific developements. And why should we not act on the same principle in relation to the facts of the Bible? Having ascertained that God speaks to us in that Book, why not conform to its precise statements as implicitly as to the laws of nature, or as if we could unfold all the grounds of harmony between its useful and sublime truths? Why should it be deemed any more necessary to trace out their connection with each other, or with the other materials of our knowledge, than to ascertain the grounds of harmony between the latter, or how they stand related to revealed truth? After all our researches, can we tell why God has spoken as he has, or wherein he ought to have spoken differently?

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Now, my brethren, we imagine that when we have learned to treat the Bible as a book of ultimate facts,

and to realize our incompetence to understand their mutual relations, and when we implicitly conform to what is written, without any modification of it by what we have learned from other sources, one of the chief obstacles to all desirable union among ourselves will vanish, and by the most natural process in the world, we shall slide into similar modes of thought, feeling, and action.

SECTION III.

Metaphysical Theology-Origin and Danger of the practice of involving questions of faith and duty in the results of abstract philosophy.

Another circumstance which has contributed to produce endless dissensions among christians, is their oft repeated attempts to settle questions of faith and duty by appeals to the intricacies of mental philosophy. Desirable though it may be to prosecute our investigations into the laws and operations of mind; and tempting as this branch of study is to many; for, as Hume observes, "it is with some minds as with some ladies, which being endowed with vigorous and florid health, require severe exercise, and reap a pleasure from what to the generality of mankind, may seem burdensome and laborious; " yet the evils of allowing the facts of religion, or the principles of moral obligation, to be at all involved in the result of such studies, are innumerable. It is not against the study itself that we speak, but against darkening by its subtleties, things which are perfectly clear upon other grounds of reason and evidence.

God has addressed his laws of nature and revelation, not to that acuteness of perception which qualifies a man for metaphysical research, but to the

conscience and common sense of mankind. They are equally adapted to the rustic and the philosopher. And instead of receiving any aid from metaphysical research, as it has been generally prosecuted, their hold upon the conscience has rather been weakened. The metaphysics of not a few involve them in labyrinths of error from which they never escape. Because their little minds, forsooth, cannot bring to view to their own satisfaction, all the latent principles in which religion and moral obligation have their foundation, they take hold with their reckless puny hands of these pillars of virtue, in the manner though not with the strength of the blind Samson, with the mad intent of demolishing the whole fabric. And with a zeal worthy of a better cause, they labor to ingulph in one common ruin all the institutions of of law both human and divine, to cure man of that norbid sensitiveness which renders him the victim of remorse or religious hope, and thus to bring him back to what they conceive to be a state of nature.

What has oftener involved men of feeble minds and unsettled moral principle in the darkness of infidelity, than the practice of suspending questions of duty upon the results of abstruse inquiry? Or to what source have infidels oftener appealed, from the time of Hobbes to this day, in their zeal to make converts to their cheerless principles, than to this? Hume's thrust at theologians, (to which we are sorry to say they have exposed themselves,) we may retort upon himself and his coadjutors; for who ever made more frequent appeals to such uncertainties than themselves? The metaphysics, he observes, are not properly a science, "but arise from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the human understanding, or from the craft of popular" systems of infidelity, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling brambles to protect

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