Paul's
notions of a God and those of a New Zealander--it would appear that
the education of this susceptibility is at least as important as the
susceptibility itself, if not more so; for without the susceptibility
itself, we should simply have no notion of music, beauty, or religion;
and between such negation and that notion of all these which New
Zealanders and Hottentots possess, not a few of our species would
probably prefer the former. It is in vain then to tell us to look into
the 'depths of our own nature' (as some vaguely say), and to judge
thence what, in a professed revelation, is suitable to us, or worthy of
our acceptance and rejection respectively. This criterion is, as we
see by the utterly different judgments formed by different classes of
Rationalists as to the how much they shall receive of the revelation
they might generally admit, a very shifting one--a measure which has no
linear unit; it is to employ, as mathematicians say, a variable as if it
were a constant quantity; or, rather, it is to attempt to find the value
of an unknown quantity by another equally unknown.
We cannot but judge, then, the principles of Rationalism to be logically
untenable.
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