Sometimes the spirit
of unbelief even assumes an air of sentimental regret at its own
inconvenient profundity. Many a worthy youth tells us he almost wishes
he could believe. He admires, of all things, the 'moral grandeur'--the
'ethical beauty' of many parts of Christianity; he condescends to
patronize Jesus Christ, though he believes that the great mass of
words and actions by which alone we know anything about him, are sheer
fictions or legends; he believes--gratuitously enough in this instance,
for he has no ground for it--that Jesus Christ was a very 'great man'
worthy of comparison at least with Mahomet, Luther, Napoleon, and 'other
heroes'; he even admits that happiness of a simple, child-like faith, in
the puerilities of Christianity--it produces such content of mind! But
alas! he cannot believe--his intellect is not satisfied--he has revolved
the matter too profoundly to be thus taken in; he must, he supposes,
(and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of
a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all
the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but
they will do no longer: more radical, more tremendous difficulties
have suggested themselves, 'from the 'depths of philosophy,' and far
different answers are required now!+
____
* Foxton's last chapter, passim, from some expressions one would almost
imagine that our author himself aspired to be, if not the Messiah, at
least the Elias, of this new dispensation.
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