The remarks that have been made are not uncalled for in the present day.
For unfortunately, it is now easy to detect in many classes of minds
a tendency to divorce Reason from Faith, or Faith from reason; and to
proclaim that 'what God hath joined together' shall henceforth exist in
alienation. We see this tendency manifested in relation both to Natural
Theology, and to Revealed Religion. The old conflict between the claims
of these two guiding principles of man (in no age wholly suppressed)
is visibly renewed in our day. In relation to Christianity especially,
there are large classes amongst us who press the claims of faith so far,
that it would become, if they had their will, an utterly unreasonable
faith; some of whom do not scruple to speak slightingly of the evidences
which substantiate Christianity; to decry and depreciate the study of
them; to pronounce that study unnecessary; and even in many cases
to insinuate their insufficiency. They are loud in the mean time in
extolling a faith which, as Whately truly observes, is no whit better
than the faith of a heathen; who has no other or better reason to offer
for his religion than that his father told him it was true! But
this plainly is not the intelligent faith which, as we have seen, is
everywhere inculcated and applauded in the Scriptures; it is not 'that
faith by which Christianity, appealing In the midst of a multitude of
such traditional religions, to palpable evidence addressed to man's
senses and understandings (in a way no other religion ever did)
everywhere destroyed the systems for which their votaries could only say
that their fathers told them they were true.
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