ut lying against our
consciences and our more perfect revelation, by justifying the actions
of those characters as right, essentially and abstractedly, although
they were excusable, or in some cases actually virtuous, according to
the standard of right and wrong which prevailed under the law.

After observing God's gracious care for us in this instance, as well as
in those which I have noticed before, I cannot but feel that we may
safely trust Him for every other similar case, if any such there be, and
that he will not permit our faith either in him or in his holy word to
be shaken, because we do not attempt to close our eyes against truth,
nor seek to support our faith by sophistry and falsehood. Feeling what
the Scriptures are, I would not give unnecessary pain to any one by an
enumeration of those points in which the literal historical statement of
an inspired writer has been vainly defended. Some instances will
probably occur to most readers; others are perhaps not known, and never
will be known to many, nor is it at all needful or desirable that they
should know them. But if ever they are brought before them, let them not
try to put them aside unfairly, from a fear that they will injure our
faith. Let us not do evil that evil may be escaped from; and it is an
evil, and the fruitful parent of evils innumerable, to do violence to
our understanding or to our reason in their own appointed fields; to
maintain falsehood in their despite, and reject the truth which they
sanction. If writers of Mr. Newman's school will persist in displaying
the difficulties of the Scripture before the eyes of those who had not
been before aware of them, let those who are so cruelly tempted be
conjured not to be dismayed; to refuse utterly to surrender up their
sense of truth,--to persist in rejecting the unchristian falsehoods
which they are called upon to worship; sure that after all that can be
said, that system will remain false to the end; and their Christian
faith, if they do not faithlessly attempt to strengthen it by unlawful
means, will stand no less unshaken.

In conclusion, Christian faith rests upon Scripture; and as it is in
itself agreeable to the highest reason, so the authenticity of the
Scriptures on which it rests is assured to us by the deliberate
conclusions of the understanding; nor is any "mortal leap" necessary at
any part of the process: nor any rejection of one truth, in order to
retain our hold on another. And if