HKB
I will now suppose the reader to have thoughtfully re-perused the paragraph containing the tenets peculiar to Christianity, and if he have his religious principles yet to form, I should expect to overhear a troubled murmur: How can I comprehend this? How is this to be proved? To the first question I should answer: Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life;--not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process. To the second: TRY IT. It has been eighteen hundred years in existence: and has one individual left a record, like the following? "I tried it; and it did not answer. I made the experiment faithfully according to the directions; and the result has been, a conviction of my own credulity." Have you, in your own experience, met with any one in whose words you could place full confidence, and who has seriously affirmed:--"I have given Christianity a fair trial. I was aware, that its promises were made only conditionally. But my heart bears me witness, that I have to the utmost of my power complied with these conditions. Both outwardly and in the discipline of my inward acts and affections, I have performed the duties which it enjoins, and I have used the means, which it prescribes. Yet my assurance of its truth has received no increase. Its promises have not been fulfilled: and I repent me of my delusion!" If neither your own experience nor the History of almost two thousand years has presented a single testimony to this purport; and if you have read and heard of many who have lived and died bearing witness to the contrary: and if you have yourself met with some one, in whom on any other point you would place unqualified trust, who has on his own experience made report to you, that He is faithful who promised, and what he promised He has proved Himself able to perform; is it bigotry, if I fear that the Unbelief, which prejudges and prevents the experiment, has its source elsewhere than in the uncorrupted judgment; that not the strong free mind, but the enslaved will, is the true original infidel in this instance? It would not be the first time, that a treacherous bosom-sin had suborned the understandings of men to bear false witness against its avowed enemy, the right though unreceived owner of the house, who had long warned it out, and waited only for its ejection to enter and take possession of the same.
I have elsewhere in the present work explained the difference between the Understanding and the Reason, by reason meaning exclusively the speculative or scientific power so called, the νους or mens of the ancients. And wider still is the distinction between the Understanding and the Spiritual Mind. But no gift of God does or can contradict any other gift, except by misuse or misdirection. Most readily therefore do I admit, that there can be no contrariety between Revelation and the Understanding; unless you call the fact, that the skin, though sensible of the warmth of the sun, can convey no notion of its figure or its joyous light, or of the colours, which it impresses on the clouds, a contrariety between the skin and the eye; or infer that the cutaneous and the optic nerves contradict each other.