And we do so, not merely or principally on account of the
absurdity it involves,--that God has expressly supplemented human
reason by a revelation containing an indeterminate but large portion
of falsities, errors, and absurdities and which we are to commit to our
little alembic, and distil as we may; not only from the absurdity of
supposing that God has demanded our faith, for statements which are
to be received only as they appear perfectly comprehensible by our
reason;--or, in other words, only for what it is impossible that we
should doubt or deny; not merely because the principle inevitably leaves
man to construct the so-called revelation entirely for himself; so that
what one man receives as genuine communication from heaven, another,
from having a different development of 'his intuitional consciousness,'
rejects as an absurdity too gross for human belief:--Not wholly, we
say, nor even principally, for these reasons; but for the still stronger
reason, that such a system of objections is an egregious trifling with
that great complex mass of evidence which, as we have said, applies to
the whole of Christianity or to none of it. As if to baffle the efforts
of man consistently to disengage these elements of our belief, the whole
are inextricably blended together.
Pages:
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116