You may see
things tending to the diffusion of happiness, but must not suppose that
there is a great unseen Benefactor, who gives them this blessed
tendency. And if you feel in yourself a disposition to gratitude, you
must treat it as a foolish, childish fancy, and suppress it as
irrational.

A sillier or a more contemptible notion--a notion more opposed to true
philosophy and common sense,--can hardly be conceived. How any one could
ever have the ignorance or the impudence to propound such an unnatural
and monstrous absurdity as a great philosophical principle, would be a
mystery, if we did not know how infidelity perverts men's
understandings, and, while puffing them up with infinite conceit of
their own wisdom, transforms them into the most arrant and outrageous
fools.

Yet this monstrous folly has found its way into books, and papers, and
reviews, and, through them, into the minds of some Christian students;
and when the madness of the notion is not detected, it destroys their
faith, and makes them miserable infidels.

Some adopt the principle that reason is man's only guide,--that reason
alone is judge of what is true and good, and that to reason every thing
must be submitted, and received or rejected, done or left undone, as
reason may decide. This sounds very plausible to many, and there is a
sense in which it may be true; but there is a sense in which it is
fearfully false; and the youth that adopts it, and acts upon it, will be
likely to land himself in utter doubt, both with regard to religion and
morals. There are numbers of cases in which reason is no guide at
all,--in which instinct, natural affection, and consciousness are our
only guides. You can never prove by what is generally called reason
alone, that man is not a machine, governed entirely by forces over
which he has no control. You cannot therefore prove by what certain
philosophers call reason, that any man is worthy of reward or
punishment, of praise or blame, of gratitude or of resentment; or that
there is any such thing in men as virtue or vice, according to the
ordinary sense of the words. The ablest logicians on earth, when they
take reason alone as their guide, come to the conclusion that there is
no such thing as liberty or moral responsibility, in the ordinary
acceptation of the terms, but that all is fixed, that all is fate, from
eternity to eternity. They accordingly come to the further conclusion,
that there is no free, voluntary Rule