This assumed liberty,
however is, as we apprehend, of the very essence of Rationalism; and
it may be called the Manichaeism of interpretation. So long as the
canonicity of any of the records, or any portion of them, or their true
interpretation, is in dispute, we may fairly doubt; but that point once
decided by honest criticism, to say we receive such and such portions,
on account of the weight of the general evidence, and yet reject other
portions, though sustained by the same evidence, because we think there
is something unreasonable or revolting in their substance, is plainly
to accept evidence only where it pleases us, and to reject it where it
pleases us not. The only question fairly at issue must ever be whether
the general evidence for Christianity will overbear the difficulty which
we cannot separate from the truths. If it will not, we must reject it
wholly; and if it will, we must receive it wholly. There is plainly no
tenable position between absolute infidelity and absolute belief.
And this is proved by the infinitely various and Protean character of
Rationalism, and the perfectly indeterminate, but always arbitrary,
limits it imposes on itself. It exists in all forms and degrees, from a
moderation which accepts nearly the entire system of Christianity,
and which certainly rejects nothing that can be said to constitute its
distinctive truth, to an audacity of unbelief, which, professing still
vaguely to reverence Christianity as 'something divine,' sponges out
nine tenths of the whole; or, after reducing the mass of it to a caput
mortuum of lies, fiction, and superstitions, retains only a few drops of
fact and doctrine,--so few as certainly not to pay for the expenses of
the critical distillation.
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